THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY
Edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison
Houghton Mifflin, 775 pages, $28
`Who reads short stories?” John Cheever asked rhetorically in a 1978 magazine piece. “I like to think that they are read by men and women in the dentist’s office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on transcontinental plane trips instead of watching a banal and vulgar film spin out the time between our coasts; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us.”
As Cheever’s brilliant stories attest, reading good short fiction is like lifting the roof off an antique dollhouse and peering inside: the world is condensed into potent miniature scenes. Few details are wasted–emotion may be conveyed merely in the way a character parts his hair or holds a loaf of bread. Such revelatory moments are rife in “The Best American Short Stories of the Century,” a compendium of artful glimpses beneath the everyday into what Flannery O’Connor referred to as “the mystery of human existence.”
Selected by John Updike (whose work appeared 12 times in the “Best American” series, including this volume) and Katrina Kenison, the 55 short stories date back to the series’ 1915 inception. Most of the authors are predictably august–Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Isaac Bashevis Singer, but there are some lesser-known contributors, such as Mary Ladd Gavell, whose subtle but heartbreaking “The Rotifer” was her only published story. Some of the authors included are a surprise because they’re better known for their work in other genres–poet Elizabeth Bishop, playwright Tennessee Williams, and essayist/children’s author E.B. White. The result is a surprisingly lively tome, a survey of 20th Century American history and the form of the short story.
One of the rewards of reading these stories in chronological order is to note changes over time in everyday conventions. In the earlier stories, characters sip wine jelly (Mary Lerner’s 1916 “Little Selves”) or highballs (Eudora Welty’s 1940 “The Hitch-Hikers”) and eat supper at automats (Bernard Malamud’s 1964 “The German Refugee”). Costs change markedly, too; in Ring Lardner’s witty 1922 story, “The Golden Honeymoon,” a narrator complains about paying $350 for a five-week stay in Florida; and in Dorothy Parker’s 1931 “Here We Are,” a bride admits to splurging and spending $22 on a fancy hat–six times the amount she would ordinarily pay.
Besides reflecting shifting societal trends, the stories also portray their share of grand-scale violence and devastation. In Tim O’Brien’s searing “The Things They Carried” (1987), a young American lieutenant in Vietnam blames himself for the death of one of his men. Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” (1981) shows us the Holocaust through the eyes of a Jewish woman in a concentration camp who attempts to conceal her baby.
Chicago is amply represented in this anthology, as a setting (Saul Bellow’s 1979 “A Silver Dish”), as a constant reference (J.F. Powers’ 1951 “Death of a Favorite”), and as the home of several authors (Richard Wright, Sherwood Anderson and current resident Rosellen Brown).
Place, time and predicament may vary in these stories, but ultimately they are connected by universal conflicts and concerns. Their brevity proves misleading, a fact that O’Connor astutely addressed in 1961. “Meaning,” she said, “is what keeps the short story from being short.”
