Book of the Bleak

WHEN JOHN UPDIKE was at Harvard last year for an informal question and answer session, he was asked who were the coming talents in American fiction. Updike, a renowned stylist, rattled off the names of several others who seek truth in poised, extended prose. Then he paused: "Of course, there is the Bleak School."

Indeed there is, and they are finally represented in force in The Best American Short Stories. Though The Best American Short Stories is matched only by Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards as a dependable fiction barometer, it has always been the stodgier culling of the year's best. After longtime series editor Martha Foley died in 1977, Houghton Mifflin tried to "enliven the series and broaden its scope" by introducing annual guest editors. In the five years since the innovation, a number of editorial biases have been expressed, and this year Anne Tyler, author of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, got her chance.

Tyler pays delighted homage to the growing strength--both in numbers and in ability--of those who compress their thoughts into short, direct sentences that describe elliptical actions and liminal, often deeply saddening moments: in short, the Bleak School.

Eight of Tyler's 20 selections were first published in The New Yorker, but even that bastion of the shimmering sentence had to make room for the brusquer talents of Raymond Carver and his ilk. Carver describes scenes and moods so sparely he appears to be hoarding his words, as if expecting to put them to better use. From "Where I'm Calling From":

We set out Frank Martin's in this rainstorm, drinking champagne and listening to music on the radio. She drove. I looked after the radio and poured champagne. We tried to make a little party out of it. But we were sad, too. There was that fried chicken, but we didn't eat any of it.

The power in these 20 stories is enormously concentrated: as Tyler writes in her introduction, "I like to imagine that if you set this book on a table, it would almost bounce, it would almost shout." Yet save for a pair of remarkably bizarre, tongue-in-cheek stories by Ursula K. LeGuin, these pages detail familiar happenings--walking the dog, vacations, and family reunions are intercut with the starker tragedies of imprisonment, alcoholism, death at birth, and death at long last.

It is not the situations but the characters in them who seize our imaginations; beneath everyday exteriors lurk haunting, explosive desires. Robert Taylor Jr.'s "Colorado" reminds us of the extraordinary, doomed needs of early adolescence:

He wanted to ride his bicycle to the shopping centers. Lakewood and Lakeside and Village, and sit at the fountains of the air-conditioned drugstores sipping limeades. He wanted to read novels that were going to be made into movies, then see those movies. He wanted a girlfriend to take to them.

Anticipation crests into loss, an everpresent prod to characters like Elaine in Marian Thurm's Starlight, who has wistful memories of her children's freshly washed and pajamaed bodies:

They were young enough then that their heads smelled sweet when she bent to kiss them. She hadn't noticed when the sweetness disappeared: one day it was simply gone.

The buffets of desire and regret cause suffering which lingers unrelieved and is, in fact, visibly controlled. Rarely does a character say "Well look, I love you." Dialogue is employed sporsely, and is often hesitantly mundane, as if the conversants had only recently recovered the use of thier tongues after an enforced silence, and weren't exactly sure what should be said. Humor is a welcome leavening in such situations, and Bobbie Ann Mason's "Graveyard Day" is particularly adept at keeping readers alert:

C.W. and Betty have just returned from Florida and they are full of news about Sea World. Betty shows Waldeen her new lote bag with a killer whale pictured on it.

"Guesa who I saw at the Louisville Airport," Betty says.

"I give up," says Waldeen.

"Colonel Sanders!"

"He's eighty-four if he's a day," C.W. adds.

"You couldn't miss him in that white suit," Betty says. "I'm sure it was him. Oh, Joe! He had a walking stick. He went strutting along--"

"No kidding!"

"He probably beats chickens to death with it," says Holly, who is standing around.

AFTER the hard but enjoyable labor of reading these little miracles, it seems a shame that the entire list can't be instantly awarded a place on the shelf next to the well thumbed offerings of de Maupassant, Chekhov, and Lawrence. Yet as Tyler cautions in her introductions, while a mediocre novel can fashion a place, a memory sheerly through fulsome persistance, even a very good short story is ephemeral. The Best American Short Stories is proud of its egalitarianism--unlike Prize Stories, it doesn't pick first, second, and third prizes. But this is faintly spurious democracy: we make our own choices and rankings, and even Tyler admits that she would bestow larger laurels on four of the 20.

Four is a small banquet, but readers can choose for themselves how many stories they wish to return to, and the menu is certainly extensive. Established masters Updike, Carver, Wright Morris, and LeGuin are joined by rising talents like Laurie Colwin and Bobbie Ann Mason, as well as a host of freshman including, curiously, James Bond.

Furthermore, readers can come away with the encouraging feeling that these new bleak writers possess such audacity and conviction that we may have to find them a more encompassing--and cheerful--name. With Juck, we can put the timid shibboleth "Post Modernism" behind us at the same time: when authors like Carol Bly look to the future they invoke a visionary power that threatens to dilate into a new brand of fiction, one in which the characters as well as the audience are party to the author's hopes, secrets, and best-guesses. Though cantankerous, disheveled Svea dies early in Bly's "The Dignity of Life," she rises in memory like a hazy phoenix, growing slowly clearer in the author's conception:

Sometimes she stood the way poor people stand, elbow bent, one hand placed on one irregular hip, and the face gazing past the immediate farmyard, as if to say "There is life beyond this paltry place--I have my eyes on it."

BY INSPIRING PLEASURE in what is seen and heard, good fiction has always taught us how to watch and listen. Larry Woiwode's "Firstborn" is the final story in the volume--by alphabetical quirk--and it is a fitting finale. In portraying the emotional schooling of his hero, Cnaries, Worwode educates the reader as well, and provides a natural jumping off point for the stories and collections to come. The death of his first boy in childbirth has clouded Charles's outlook, but he endures in the face of grave trials and doubts, and his blind obdurance is rewarded just as satisfyingly as it was in the primers of our youth. After his fourth child slips easily into the world and begins to run about with his hair streaming in the wind. Charles can at last look on the world "with less darkness in his eyes: that is [he] began at last to be able to begin again to see."