Best of the Best

Included in the biographical notes on the writers anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 1997 are brief commentaries concerning the inspiration for their works. Some are purely anecdotal--Robert Bausch's detailing how a conversation about childhood bullying became the genesis for the bitingly funny "Nobody in Hollywood"--but most are insightful glimpses into the writers' imaginations, oftentimes offering prose that is as strikingly poetic as that found in their fiction.

The most illuminating and eloquent is Tobias Wolff's explication of his short story "Powder"--which centers on a father and son's attempts at making their way home for Christmas Eve in the midst of a snowstorm. The urgency of memory, the need to mediate all the past's heart-break and humor, infuses Wolff's story with dead-pan beauty. Reminiscent of Raymond Carver's classic "Popular Mechanics" (minus the bloody conclusion) in terms of its powerful brevity, "Powder" is the best work included in the anthology.

Although "Powder" is three and half pages of genius prose--which is also included in Wolff's most recent book "The Night In Question"--it represents all the stories included this year's collection of "The Best American Short Stories." They may not all necessarily take the art of the short story to much needed, new innovative levels, but they all offering precisely crafted glimpse into the human experience that echo entire worlds and lifetimes.

The twenty-one stories featured in the collection were chosen and edited by Pulitzer prizing winning author E. Annie Proulx (The Shipping News, Accordion Crimes). Proulx offers a good variety of style and content--everything from T. Coraghessan Boyle's strikingly titled exploration of the abortion rights conflict "Killing Babies" to Robert Stone's "Under the Pintons" a Hemingway-esque man-and-the-elements tale. Proulx has selected precisely crafted works that stand on their own--making her surprising attempt to unify them in four "chapter" titles ("Manners and Right Behavior," "Identifying the Stranger," "Perceived Social Values," and "Rites of Passage") somewhat unnecessary.

Along with stories by well known authors like Wolff, Stone and Cynthia Ozick, are the works of emerging talents like newly minted literary wunderkind Junot Diaz. "Fiesta, 1980"--which is also included in Diaz's critically lauded 1996 debut "Drown"--details a Dominican American boy's encounters with his father's Puerto Rican mistress and his experience at a lively family party. Here Diaz once again proves that he is one of the best young writers around not for what Proulx calls his distinct "cultural, ethnic, and class" perspective, but because underneath his deceptively simple, "street vernacular" prose is a powerful storyteller as equally capable of the comic (the narrator's chronic car-sickness makes for some oddly funny moments) as he is with exploring the tricky dynamic existence between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, and families in general.

Another standout is Carolyn Cooke's "Bob Darling." The story details the strained relationship that develops between the dying title character and an alternately vacant and moody Manhattan woman. The growing distance between Darling and Carla is comically captured in a lengthy argument about the differences between naked and nude.

The story builds subtlety--with Cooke jumping from Darling and Carla speeding through the French countryside on a bullet train in the present to past scenes of their meeting and their misadventures in Venice--to a beautifully realized conclusion. Cooke's atypical story chronicles Americans abroad coming to terms with everything from mortality and loneliness to nudity.

The story that comes closest to Wolff's stunningly rendered "Powder" is "Transactions" by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff (No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng). As wonderfully bizarre as it poetic, it tells the story of a traveling salesman hawking American goods and culture ("Witch hazel. Superman. Band-Aids, Zane Grey. Chili Con carne...Camels") on a Caribbean island who buys a poor German girl that he finds on the roadside. Before taking the girl home to his sterile wife, they go to an enchanted spring/hotel/tourist attraction run by a woman with an obsession with Jet magazine.

From this surreal material, delivered in prose reminiscent of the best of Clarence Major's fiction, Cliff confronts the Americanization of not only the Caribbean but the world, finding poetry in every image and line. "A salesman is free, he tells himself...People look forward to his arrival, and not just for the goods he carries. He is part troubadour."

Anthologies tend to lend themselves to filler, but not one of the stories included in The Best American Short Stories disappoints. In a year of monster tomes--Don DeLillo's Underworld, Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles--this collection shows that the short story promises to outlive the long novel for good reason.