The best short stories contain novels," writes Erdrich in her incisive introduction to this anthology. Then she proceeds to make her point with the 20 diverse selections that follow. From Stephen Dixon's "Man, Woman and Boy," an involuted, Pinteresque tale of a marriage that shuffles time and perceptions like a deck of cards, to Andrea Lee's palpably sensuous "Winter Barley," these are stories with unusual staying power.
Despite the "blind" selection process (manuscripts were submitted to Erdrich without the authors' bylines), several of her picks come from such familiar names as John Updike, whose "Playing with Dynamite," an elegiac reflection on aging, opens the collection. But there are equally fine contributions from new waiters including Susan Power, represented by the sad fable "Red Moccasins," and Tony Earley. His "Charlotte," about the world of professional wrestling, juggles slapstick, philosophy and even a whiff of poetry in one brilliantly choreographed tour de force.
This collection is especially satisfying because Erdrich has thoughtfully arranged her courses. Added spice comes from the intriguing contributors' notes—some practically short stories in themselves—and Erdrich's vivid introductions. After savoring this collection, you may feel much the way Erdrich did following Wendell Berry's Kentucky saga "Pray Without Ceasing": "Beautifully knit, pitch-perfect in design," she writes, "this story is a meal after which you don't want coffee or brandy or even a cigar, but simply to walk outside and gaze up into dark space." (Houghton Mifflin, $22.95)
by Peter Mayle
The citizenry of the Loire Valley is probably already très irrité with Mayle for overpopularizing the region he wrote about so winningly in A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence. His very slight, sometimes charming first novel, set guess where, will do little to reverse the trend.
The perennially rumpled Simon Shaw is not a happy-man. Newly divorced, he is director of an immensely successful British ad agency, has buckets of money, swell cars and a superb valet who runs his bath and his life. But Simon is worn to the nub by the gray London days, the endless drudgery-of making nicey-nice with clients and soothing temperamental colleagues. Desperate for a change of scenery, he drives to the South of France. When his Porsche, expensively injured on a country road, strands him in a region known as the Luberon, he meets a blond divorcée who lures him into a change of careers: hôtelier.
Simultaneously, a small-lime crook fresh out of prison is hatching a plot to rob the local bank. Mayle's strength lies not in his ability to create characters—many of the novel's cast members are stereotypes—or to tell a story (the plot has a cobbled-together feeling) but in his asides and observations. "Polo, of course, was the ultimate hobby for the socially ambitious advertising man," he notes. "Ruinously expensive, upper-class accoutrements, and with any kind of luck, a chance to be on swearing terms with royalty." And once again in Hotel Pastis, Mayle makes Provence sound like the most enticing place this side of paradise. Reservations anyone? (Knopf, $23)
by Rosemary Mahoney
The author, an American with dual Irish citizenship, moved to Ireland for a year in 1991 to gather material for this informal study on the plight of women in that country. Much of her research was done over pints of Guinness in Dublin pubs, and in Corofin, a small village in County Clare.
While Mahoney contends that she visited at a time of momentous change for women—the country's antiabortion laws were being challenged and its first female president, Mary Robinson, had just been sealed—readers will more likely conclude that change has yet to come, and women's rights have advanced little against the constraints of the Roman Catholic Church.
Mahoney includes observations from Robinson and other prominent women like poet Eavan Boland, but her narrative is funniest and most absorbing when she lets ordinary-women speak for themselves. She captures the profanity, the colloquialisms, the sense of despair in their voices.
Mahoney's portrait of rural life is especially bleak. The people of Corofin have none of the gentle charm of characters in a Maeve Binchy novel. They're lonely, alcoholic and have few prospects for decent jobs. The men dress badly, drink too much and are often still living with their mothers at age 50. Social life consists of pub crawling. Not too surprisingly, conversation there is frequently inane and crude, and much of it is reported verbatim. Readers might wish Mahoney had adhered more strictly to her stated purpose for the book, and not diminished it by wasting so many pages on purely drunken blather. (Houghton Mifflin, $21.95)
by William Styron
The Virginia Tidewater, a stretch of land located at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, is the setting of this collection of three stories originally published in Esquire magazine between 1978 and 1987.
As he did in his 1979 novel, Sophie's Choice, Styron has reshaped personal experience and the results, while not as ambitious, are still compelling. His narrator is Paul Whitehurst, a man whose memories are lit by the "incandescence" of youth.
In "Love Day," Paul is a young Marine aboard a troopship sailing toward Okinawa in 1945. Bored by the company of other officers, Paul casts his mind back to his father, who built Navy ships in the 1930s, a job that helped guide the country out of a Depression and, in Paul's mind, into a war. The memory allows Styron to paint a picture of homesickness and fear in the face of empty bravura.
Paul is 10 years younger in "Shadrach" and playing marbles in a neighbor's yard when a stranger makes a sudden appearance. He's a former slave, a dying man who's walked from Alabama to Tidewater to be buried where he was born; in doing so, Paul believes the old man is attempting to recapture what might have been "the one pure, untroubled moment in his life."
Styron's real achievement is the title story where Paul relives the night and the morning his mother died. He's 13, and here in the summer heat, amid the sycamores, the electric fans, the scent of coffee and warm bread, Styron evokes her inexorable pain, the father's helplessness, and the boy's angry bewilderment.
No matter the intensity of the moment, Styron's style is impeccably genteel. While providing a nostalgic glimpse of America, he writes with lyrical urgency and reveals a deep love for the constant ebb and flow, the comic and tragic vicissitudes of life. (Random House $17)
Photographs by James VanDerZee
In 1917, when James VanDerZee opened his photo studio in Harlem, the neighborhood was just becoming the great proving ground of black urban life in America, a place where African-Americans of all classes converged to be somewhere while getting somewhere. The people in VanDerZee's pictures—matrons of Harlem society, soldiers back from World War I, newlyweds and drag queens, high school orchestras and softball teams—wanted to see themselves in the bright trappings of the middle classes that they had entered or were struggling toward.
VanDerZee, whose work is currently on exhibit in a major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, gave his sitters something more, a memento of their dreams about themselves. The young woman in My Corsage (1931) is not just dressed for a dance but costumed to meet the Jazz Age. VanDerZee's objective was to present daily events of black life in terms of American life generally: valentines, wedding albums, baby pictures and funeral cards. In the process he made poignant images in which the people of Harlem appear as neighbors, family and friends—as citizens, not as mug shots or poster images for the war on poverty.
Poverty wasn't an overwhelming problem in Harlem for most of VanDerZee's career. But by the 1950s middle-class blacks were moving out and depriving the photographer of his usual clientele. He and his wife, Gaynella, were old and destitute by 1968, when he was rediscovered by Reginald McGhee, a young photographer who was working on an exhibition, Harlem on My Mind., at New York City's Metropolitan Museum. Before his death at age 96 in 1983, VanDerZee found a modest living as a portraitist, but this time for the likes of Bill Cosby, Muhammad Ali and Miles Davis. He posed them all in an ornate wooden side chair that had appeared in some of his earliest studio shots. It could stand for the Harlem that had vanished—or would have if VanDerZee hadn't kept it for us in these evocative pictures. (Abrams, $39.95)
>Louise Erdrich
SWEET ON SHORT STORIES
WHEN IT CAME TO SELECTING THE Best American Short Stories of 1993. editor Louise Erdrich sank her teeth into the task. Propped up on pillows in her reading corner, she chewed over the entries' merits, fortified by a case of licorice. "I like the red better," says Erdrich, 39, "but you feel more professional eating black,"
Erdrich, most famous for magical novels inspired by her Chippewa heritage, considered 120 blind entries winnowed from 2,500 by series editor Katrina Kenison. Though she tried to identify the authors ("I'm a very bad guesser. I didn't even get John Updike right!"), she says there was no mistaking the power of the stories she picked: "They grab you by the collar and spin you around." So moved was Erdrich by Thorn Jones's "I Want to Live!"—the wrenching account of a woman's battle with cancer—thai she went and got a blood test.
Best is one of a bumper crop of new books from the Erdrich household. Husband Michael Dorris is out promoting his short-story collection, Working Men. Later this month an expanded version of Erdrich's first novel Love Medicine will appear, followed in January by The Bingo Palace, the fourth in her Native American series. The couple aims to have their books published on the 18th of the month—in honor of the birthdays of two of their three young daughters. (They also have two grown children.)
Proud as Erdrich is of Best, she does have one regret. Her nepotism rule forced her to exclude both her husband and her sister, Lise Erdrich. But, she says, "I'm going to find out who's editing it next year and lean on them!
- Contributors:
- Pam Lambert,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Jean Reynolds,
- Thomas Curwen,
- Richard Lacayo.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
