SHORT FICTION
Not the best
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`Despite a few excellent stories, the volume does not measure up to its predecessors.'
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THIS is an annual collection of the best American short fiction. The series editor selects about 150 stories from the 3,000 published in 364 U.S. and Canadian periodicals. A guest editor who is widely recognised as a leading writer of the genre makes a final selection of 20. This makes the series popular and widely respected. The present volume is guest-edited by Lorrie Moore, a renowned writer of three excellent short story collections — including the latest, Birds of America — and two novels. She is known for her emotionally intense and ironic sketches of modern and life and intimate relations.
The guest editor plays a role in the selection of the stories and this year is no exception. When Amy Tan was the guest editor, there were at least three stories by writers of Asian origin. Last year too, writers from Europe and Asia had been featured. This time, the writers are all American.
Every guest editor finds new definitions for the short story: It is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. A short story is a flower; a novel is a job. The short story is an end-oriented form, and in the best ones, it illuminates meanings with surprise and inevitability. It is claimed that the stories in the anthology have emotional heart and dramatic unpredictability, with intelligence and compassion. The editor has relied more on careful character development, setting and situation than on originality or stylistic sparkle.
Balanced mix
Writers featured in the volume include masters such as John Updike, Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, Coraghessan Boyle and Sherman Alexie. There are also new writers like Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum whose "Accomplice" is about the surprises in schooling. Out of the 20, eight were published in the New Yorker. There are two from Harper's Magazine, but strangely none from the Atlantic, though a good number is included in the best 100 titles. Zyzzyva, Granta and Meridian are magazine from which stories have been selected for the first time. Family relations, ambition, gender, romance, war, nostalgia, alcoholism, pets, criminality are some of the streams that form the lingering current in most stories.
The master storyteller, John Updike's "The Walk with Elizanne" is poignant nostalgia, of the adolescent David Kern's first kiss and a tender relationship, recollected after 50 years, at a school reunion. Paula Fox's "Grace", a well-crafted story, is about a man's deeply meaningful relation with a dog. A pet cat caught inside a room and the relations in a bar forms the the theme of T. Coraghessan Boyle's "Tooth and Claw". Catherine Brady's "Written in Stone" is about Hassan, an Iranian immigrant to the US and his estranged wife. Alcoholism is dominant in Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn, I Will Redeem". The alcoholic Spokane Indian selling newspapers for redeeming the regalia of his grandmother and the pawn shop owner's dramatic gifting it to him is a story par excellence. A mental asylum is the locale of Charles D'Ambrosio's "Screen Writer", in which the portrayal of violence is shocking. Criminality is the theme of Stuart Dybek's "Breasts".
The stories of Mary Yukari Waters have been continuously featuring in the annual collection for a few years. This time the location of her story "Mirror Studies" is Japan and the theme is woven around a primate specialist adjusting to a heart condition and memories of the war. The other story without an American setting is Nell Freudenberger's "The Tutor". The story is set in Mumbai. The central character of her story is 29-year-old Zubin, who tutors High School students for American and British College entrance examinations. The dynamics of an American expatriate father and daughter relationship forms the theme of the story.
Deborah Isenberg, Edward P. Jones, Trudy Lewis, Jill McCorkle, Thomas McGuane, Angela Pneuman and John Edgar Wideman are the other writers in the volume. The collection, by and large, showcasing only some of the best of American short fiction is "a kind of group portrait of how humanity is currently faring". Despite a few excellent stories, the volume does not measure up to its predecessors.
K. KUNHIKRISHNAN
The Best American Short Stories 2004, edited by Lorrie Moore, series editor Katrina Kenison, Houghton Mifflin, $14.
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