The Best American
Short Stories 1989
Edited by Margaret Atwood
with Shannon Ravenel
Houghton Mifflin, 341 pages, 17.95
Like any good American, I automatically distrust euphoric feelings that can`t be explained chemically, and for that reason have been trying for years to account for the unique pleasure to be found in short stories. A successful story gives us something different from any other reading experience, more like a memorable event in our own lives than the more obviously esthetic satisfaction we take away from a great novel or a perfect lyric.
The Canadian story-writer and novelist Margaret Atwood, introducing this year`s Best American collection, probably comes closest to the heart of the matter by linking story-reading to the aural mystery of hearing, and overhearing, stories in childhood. ”We listen before we can read,” she points out, and ”(s)ome of our listening is more like listening in, to the calamitous or seductive voices of the adult world. . . . We have all been little pitchers with big ears, shooed out of the kitchen when the unspoken is being spoken. . . . ”
As adult readers, then, we still expect a story to impart a secret, and more often than not a good writer lets us in on one. So it`s fitting that one of the best stories in this year`s collection-the one most likely to have you reading it aloud to annoyed friends-illustrates something most adults have forgotten, how children accept the most amazing events in their lives as a matter of course. Mark Richard`s ”Strays” shows that ”reality and enchantment are the same thing” for children, as Atwood says: Two young poor- white boys temporarily abandoned by their parents are left in charge of their totally dissolute Uncle Trash who, after cheating his small nephews at cards to finance a game in town, comes home drunk and prosperous.
”Uncle Trash shows us a headstand on the table drinking a bottle of Champale, then he stands in the sink and sings, `Gather My Far-Flung Thoughts Together.` My brother and I chomp our cigars and clap, but in our hearts we are low and lonesome.” Weeks later, ”Uncle Trash doesn`t remember July, but when we tell him about it he says he thinks July was probably a good idea at the time.”
Another story, possibly the best of all, is equally effective in a far more subtle and intriguing way. Set in 1952, David Wong Louie`s
”Displacement” is a portrait of the artist as an aristocratic young Chinese woman, a painter, who has been displaced first by the conventional family who disowned her and later by the Red Army, which led her to flee China by marrying a peasant who was emigrating to America. Mrs. Chow and her husband care for an abusively senile widow in return for board and room, and the story is about their attempt to find a new home in still another very eccentric and very California milieu.
Aside from the cool and uncanny character of Mrs. Chow, ”Displacement” is noteworthy for something that has become rare in American fiction, full and vivid descriptions of people, which in this case show us how hilariously grotesque American life can look to an uncritical but detached alien.
There are two more stories about women artists-one a Canadian frontier poet and the other a contemporary American photographer-and both are in the first rank of this year`s stories. Alice Munro`s ”Meneseteung” combines the short story`s impact with a novel`s density of detail to portray one of the sentimental spinster ”poetesses” who were standard features of life in the raw 19th Century towns of southwestern Ontario. ”I thought, What about imagining one of these women and giving her some talent,” says Munro in the Contributors` Notes that are one of the welcome additions to this series,
”-not enough to make her any sort of Emily Dickinson, just enough to give her glimpses, stir her up?”
The result is a heartbreaking story of loneliness, oppression and ambiguous triumph ”at the edge of Victorian civilization.” Interestingly, Almeda Joynt Roth in the 1880s and superhip Willa, campus heroine of Douglas Glover`s ”Why I Decide to Kill Myself and Other Jokes,” share the same basic experience a century apart: In each story we watch the mind of an artist transforming sexual anguish and emotional breakdown into the basis for creative work and the credentials of independence.
Glover is especially successful in rendering the reflexively self-deprecating and desperately witty voice of a woman just beginning to see how she has connived at her own victimization at the hands of an incredibly infantile man-an old story to women, but one most men aren`t capable of acknowledging, much less telling.
Madison Smartt Bell does an equally convincing impersonation in ”Customs of the Country,” whose waitress narrator, a recovering drug abuser, describes a sojourn in a strange town that is part of an effort to reclaim her son from foster parents who want to adopt him. Through a long, futile winter she hears a woman being beaten in the next apartment, and after she fails in her mission she literally strikes a blow-also futile, but satisfying to her-against that woman`s misery.
Having looked at a quarter of the stories in this unusually strong collection, we still haven`t got past the three-star, or really great, category: Robert Boswell`s ”Living to Be a Hundred,” which is about an innocent but fatal menage a trois; Frederick Busch`s ”Ralph the Duck,”
another triangular and unconsummated love story, told by a campus policeman who is a part-time student; and ”The Boy on the Train” by Arthur Robinson, whose narrator meditates ruefully on how he seems to have become the father he was unable to love as a child.
And then there are the merely fine stories, like ”The Concert Party” by the dependable Mavis Gallant, who hasn`t missed one of these collections for at least a decade; Bharati Mukherjee`s ”The Management of Grief,” which deals with the shattered aftermath of the Air India bombing of 1985; and Harriet Doerr`s ”Edie: A Life,” which will remind many readers of Flaubert`s ”A Simple Heart.”
Of the 20 stories, only two could be considered weak, and one of them, Barbara Gowdy`s ”Disneyland,” is enthralling right up to the point where it merely stops instead of ends; some readers will think a page is missing. But all told, there are enough good stories here to cause an overdose.
