All is not lost. My second set of choices from The Best American Short Stories 1990 proved to be more uplifting, if not exactly cheery. This time I decided to abandon the order altogether and go with writers I knew or knew of. I started with one of my favorite writers, Alice Munro, probably the most famous of the group.
Richard Ford included two of Munro's stories in this collection, but I've read only the first so far, "Differently," a story about two women's friendship. The protagonist, Georgia, is rather conventional until she meets Maya, a woman who is pretty wild, but interesting. Under Maya's influence, Georgia changes, not entirely for the worse. It's one of those stories in which the events of the narrative are not in themselves earth-shattering but serve to point the way toward the main character's realization of some truth, an "accidental clarity" (214) as the narrator puts it.
Elizabeth Tallent's story, "Prowler," is also of that kind. This story is about a man's coming to terms with his ex-wife and his son's feelings about her. I chose it because Ms. Tallent was once my teacher and I admire her work and her ideas about writing and fiction. She didn't disappoint me. "Prowler" was a fast read and the most hopeful story I've read so far in this collection.
The other two stories also ended on a hopeful note, I think, if a bit more tentative. "Finding Natasha," by Madison Smartt Bell (an author I'd heard of but not read), is the story of a recovering addict's search for his girlfriend who's also an addict. As he moves through his old haunts, revealing his past, we worry that he will fall back into his old ways. It's not clear if he learns anything along the way, though, so when he finally finds Natasha, we're not sure what will happen next. It could go either way.
Much the same is Patricia Henley's story, "The Secret of Cartwheels," about Roxie, a 13-year-old girl whose mother has to go to a mental hospital for a few months, leaving her to cope with the painful upheaval her mother's sudden absence causes. At the end, her feelings about her mother have changed, but we're not sure if it's a change for the better. Because Henley is the only writer of the four I hadn't heard of, I looked her up and found that the story is largely autobiographical. It made me wonder whether the author eventually came to terms with her mother's illness.
As I was reading these stories I got to thinking about how different they are from stories that are "action-packed"--adventure stories, mystery stories, spy thrillers--that propel us toward a conclusion that puts everything right. Not realistic, perhaps, but satisfying nonetheless. Often people who like such stories don't like the more interior action of what's sometimes referred to as a "literary" story, the kind usually found in short fiction anthologies. They might see such stories as boring, incomprehensible, or just plain weird. And the reverse also tends to be true: many people who prefer literary stories won't read what to them is "pulp" fiction, shallow stories that don't engage the mind. Negative stereotypes attach to both sides of the divide, it seems.
But some of us, like me, read literary and non-literary stories, finding each type enjoyable in its own way. I draw the line, however, at stories that don't seem to have a plot or a point to make or that are just poorly written. And there are plenty of stories out there like that, even (maybe especially) in literary anthologies.
As for these stories, I enjoyed all four. I'd like to check out other work by these writers sometime, especially their novels. You might want to give them a try as well.
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