Why don't the best literary fiction writers tell stories the way our best story-telling friends do?

I knew a guy in the Marine Corps who'd been an honest-to-god cowboy before joining the military. He'd also spent a few years at Colgate, but by far, the more fascinating part of his past was that he'd once ridden a horse, carried a rifle to protect against bears, and herded animals. His first name was Michael, but he always went by his middle name, Bevan. Bevan! Have you ever known a Bevan? He's the only one I've ever come across, and his stories were as unique as his name.

His companion on many of his cowboy adventures had been a dog named Dog, who once--as Bevan told it--saved him from a giant rat that was leaping toward his throat out in the barn by catching the rat mid-leap and ripping him into two pieces with one shake of his head.

Bevan was a natural storyteller. He had a sonorous voice, and he knew how to draw out a story, build suspense, and get a laugh. People loved to listen to him.

It occurs to me from time to time, while reading the best literary fiction, that stories in, say, The New Yorker don't read like the kinds of stories Bevan would tell. All that metaphorical language that must have taken days of fasting and psychedelic drugs to come up with. All that tightness of language. When a scene is described, it's never in the language a normal person uses when telling a story. I can't imagine Bevan saying this, for example: "He was wearing a tattered coat and a faded black shirt, which gave him a penurious appearance. He ordered a coffee. I ordered a mint tea." (From "Sevastopol" by Emilio Fraia.) Or this: "There were six of us in the house. We were all about the same age, and at some point during the summer—I had moved in at the beginning of March, when the mornings were still cold, veins of ice glittering over the front steps—this became claustrophobic, unbearable. The house smelled of sweat and bike tires and something at the back of the oven being charred over and over again." (From "Old Hope" by Clare Sestanovich.)

What gives? Why don't the best story writers write stories that sound like the people we think of as the best storytellers? 

Part of it is obviously the difference between the spoken medium and the written. Bevan can use his voice or his body language as a tool to convey feeling, emotion, or humor. The writer can't. All the writer has is the word on the page, so she has to sometimes use her tools in ways we don't normally think of in order to get the same effect. We're all familiar with the concept of having different vocabularies for speaking, listening, writing, and reading, with reading being the one where we know the most words and can handle the most complexity. So it's only natural that writers would push language to limits it isn't build to handle in the spoken word.

Nonetheless, I wonder sometimes if we aren't missing out by how seldom the tone of the spoken story influences the written one. It wasn't always that way. American literary history is full of writers whose voice could easily transfer to the stage or the barroom, from Twain to O.Henry to Vonnegut. 

The distance between modern American fiction and the spoken story is nearly as great as the distance between modern American written poetry and music. I don't really want every poem I read to be as easily understandable on first listen as a typical song lyric. Most of the poems I encounter, I'm going to encounter in written form, and if it's a written story, then it needs to use the full set of tools the written word has at its disposal in order to be engaging. But every time I go to a poetry reading and have absolutely no idea what a poet is talking about when I hear a poem I've never seen before read out loud, I wonder if the propagation of the printed word hasn't robbed poetry of some of its organic pleasure. Poetry, more than any other genre, ought to be pleasant--dare I say fun??--to hear out loud. A modern poem that delights in upsetting expectations and resisting meaning provides one kind of enjoyment, but it's a different one from words that make music that conveys a feeling we've all had but couldn't find words for. A poem that requires hours to dissect, one that literally nobody can make much sense of hearing it read aloud without studying it beforehand, is providing a very different experience to the reader from what poetry offered for thousands of years of human history. 

Storytelling has followed a similar, albeit less extreme, path. I'm not suggesting we all start telling stories the way Ira Glass does. The truth is, I'm not a great oral storyteller. In fact, I'm kind of bad at it. When I tell a story at work, I tend to get more "cool story, bro" type responses than fascination. So naturally, I'm going to lean toward the page-centric, written literary story when I've got something to say. But I think it's worth considering, when writing those dense stories, whether what we're writing has the potential to captivate a non-literary specialist, and if it doesn't, whether maybe it should. It doesn't necessarily have to be "fun." I don't think writing about child soldiers or rape or abuse is going to lead to a story that's fun to read. But it can still be captivating. It can still cast a spell on a reader that makes the reader feel he must keep reading, as opposed to a story a reader only gets through out of a sense of duty. 

The last story I had published, "The Lifesaver on Board the Jamaica Mon," was me re-discovering what I myself find captivating. I actually had fun writing it, which I don't think has happened since I got serious about writing six years ago. After years of trying to learn how I'm supposed to write, I feel like how I'm supposed to write and how I want to write are finally re-converging a little bit. (Yes, I'm annoyed by an editorial insertion in the first sentence that put a questionable hyphen where a comma should go, but I'm trying not to let that spoil my fun.) 

This is what I want to do from now on. I feel like I'm sort of figuring out style and voice. I know what a Jacob R. Weber story is, at least sort of. It's kind of a big step for me. And maybe the strongest evidence that it's really happening isn't so much the stories I'm writing, but my ability to quit chasing false leads and spend hours and hours writing stories that aren't really the kind of story I want to write.