The Best American Short Stories 1990
Queenan, Joe
rr he most voracious fiction aficio1 nada I know says that she never touches short stories because "just when I start to get interested in the characters it's time to say goodbye." She wouldn't have...
...My dog beat up another dog...
...Reading these stories is like listening to a mildly arthritic aunt complain about having to wait forty-five minutes to get fitted for a new cane...
...Don't they themselves ever grow weary of their arctic prose, with its winsomedescriptions of crestfallen children's-book illustrators and melancholy divorcees...
...Are ennui and dismay, disgruntlement and rue the only emotions they feel...
...The fact that a repeat offender like Richard Ford included it in his Best American Short Stories 1990 is a cause for celebration...
...The Best American Short Stories 1990 is an anthology of mopey, muted, and frigid fiction that has previously surfaced in the New Yorker and the Atlantic, or—after being rejected by the New Yorker and the Atlantic—in literary magazines such as Antaeus, the Hudson Review, and Ploughshares...
...You just wish she'd shut up and drink her Maalox...
...and "The Secret of Cartwheels" is about school days in an orphanage...
...The man responsible for these selections is this year's guest editor, the writer Richard Ford...
...The twenty stories are, for the most part, written by creative writing teachers, or alumni of creative writing programs, and with maddening regularity deal with people connected with universities...
...He could...
...Basically, these are stories by WASPs about WASPs for WASPs...
...If anything makes him nervous, it's that he won't get a chance to beat up or be beaten up...
...Consider this: having decided to read the works in no particular order, I opened to a story called "The Reverse Bug," whose first sentence introduced a professor of Conversational English for Adults at Concordance University in Connecticut...
...Morning" deals with a Columbia University graduate student who gets a bizarre job doing research for a man she believes to be Joe Queenan is a frequent contributor to Barron's and other publications...
...She wouldn't have any problem saying goodbye to most of the characters in this collection...
...Differently" begins with the words "Georgia once took a creative-writing course . . ." And even the stories that do not concern academics still involve the educational system in some way...
...W hile reading these stories I kept asking myself if the authors had any idea how tiny and constricted the world they occupy is...
...9.95 paper Joe Queenan THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 47...
...The fact that somebody wrote a story such as this is a step in the right direction for our civilization...
...Or load up the van with a couple of six-packs and burn rubber down the Interstate—just for the hell of it...
...a murderer...
...Sounds like Garrison Keillor had a hand in this somewhere...
...Eisenheim the Illusionist," which appeared in Esquire, is a nice, traditional sort of story that owes a lot to Borges, Kafka, Thomas Mann, and even Marcel Ayme...
...Wigwag...
...Car-Crash While Hitchhiking," which reads more like a poem than a short story, makes an impression, and "The Wizard" is enlivened by some fairly uproarious diction...
...Not only is the foul-mouthed rattlesnake who narrates the story kind of fascinating, but the author's biographical note, in which he explains how the story came into being, may be more riveting than just about anything else in the entire book...
...It's his living, more or less, though I never let him make money doing it...
...19.95...
...Thus, a story called "Wigtime" is about high school chums...
...Nothing to Ask For" is a college buddy story with one twist: one of the buddies has AIDS...
...Consider the names of the authors: Edward Allen, Patricia Henley, Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Joan Wickersham, Lorrie Moore, Dennis McFarland, Pam Houston, Padgett Powell, Elizabeth Tallent, Alice Munro, Madison Smartt Bell...
...in German literature...
...Richard Ford...
...By this time I was fed up and decided to continue riffling through the pages until I found a story I could be reasonably certain would not feature academics as protagonists...
...1=1 THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 1990 Edited by Richard Ford/Houghton Mifflin/374 pp...
...The Wizard" deals with drug-dealing high school kids...
...Still, my favorite story was "In a Father's Place," which pits a small-town lawyer and patriarch against a woman who would rather sit at home reading Jacques Derrida than go yachting...
...Happily there are a few exceptions to this group moping, as Ford has selected several stories by writers whose crackling prose makes his own indifferent prose sound . . . well, prosaic...
...The Fireman's Wife" by Richard Bausch fit the bill: a sturdy, competent, no-frills affair with a solid, proletarian core...
...Don't any of these people ever get really, really ticked off...
...Another story that makes you sit up and pay attention is a strange little number called "Typical" by Padgett Powell,which deals with a real nasty SOB from deep in the heart of Texas who begins the story by declaring: Yesterday a few things happened...
...Beating up other dogs is his thing...
...I then read "You're Ugly, Too," which concerns a professor of American history at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest...
...Does it ever occur to them that they deal again and again with an emotional terrain—the disappointment of the middle-class college graduate—that John Cheever worked to death decades ago...
...I next read "Commuter Marriage," which deals with a woman in publishing who met her husband while he was getting his Ph.D...
...Of course, Bausch is on the faculty of the writing program at George Mason University, so he should know...
...Of the eighteen writers represented in this collection, I counted one Jew (maybe), no Italians, no Hispanics, no Poles, no blacks, no American Indians, and certainly no one of an exotic ethnic stripe (Indian, Jamaican, Lithuanian...
...Most of them are still in it...
...He's healthy...
...A story called "Mr...
...Also irksome is the collection's microscopic ethnic waveband...
...He does this when he can...
...You sort of see her point...
...Obviously, school made a big impression on a lot of American short story writers...
...He means no harm by it, expects other dogs to beat him up---.-no anxiety about it...
...Every day a few do...
...I don't think I am...
...The prototypical Best story is entitled "A Kind of Simple, Happy Grace' and appeared in the remorselessly twee magazine Wigwag...
Vol. 24 • January 1991 • No. 1
