Ann Beattie’s introduction to this year’s Best American Short Stories is a piece of writing to puzzle over–to browse through uncomprehendingly on first reading, to reread with growing bafflement after finishing the collection, and finally to scratch one’s head over in utter confusion several days later. A longtime practitioner of the passive, elliptical style that seems to be becoming ever more popular among contemporary American short story writers, Beattie has truly topped herself in this introduction, which attempts to say everything and finally ends up saying nothing much at all about that most elegant and succinct of literary forms, the short story. Listen to one passage:
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What exactly is Beattie driving at? The first few sentences seem to be leading up to some observation about stories and their use of language, only to trail off into a series of disjointed observations that culminate in a curious comparison between writers and kids. The absolute conviction of Beattie’s tone in this passage–in fact throughout the introduction–constantly promises that she’ll get to some kind of point, that if only we can wade through one more parenthetical remark or a few more confidential asides, we will finally come to some insight about why writers write or why readers read short stories. Yet one emerges from this introduction little more enlightened than one went into it, equipped merely with the knowledge that Ann Beattie’s nonfictional writing relies to a rather surprising extent on television metaphors. Provided with eight pages in one of the best-read collections of short stories in America, in which she could have said anything she pleased about her chosen form, Beattie offers us an essay that reveals nothing but a few scattered observations, several vague tidbits of opinion, and the apparently accidental insight that she certainly seems to spend an awful lot of her time watching TV.
It is only fair at this point to confess that I have never been a fan of the Best American Short Stories series, although I am a longtime fan of the short story. Given a choice between short story compilations, I infinitely prefer the annual O. Henry Award collection, a slim volume that comes out every year a month or two after the latest Best American installment. It generally does a far more credible job of picking the 20 or so stories that could conceivably be regarded as that year’s best. If nothing else, the O. Henry collection, under the steady editorship of William Abrahams, has managed to maintain an impressive openness of mind about the myriad forms of the short story. This has given its annual picks a range of subject, tone, and style rarely found anywhere else.
Although none of the stories in this year’s collection manages to achieve quite the same level of static passivity as “Janus,” Beattie has nevertheless chosen a group of stories that leaves one waiting with impatience for a war, a major earthquake, a fight between some cowboys and Indians–anything that would shake these characters out of their torpid stupor. For it’s not merely that nothing much ever takes place in these stories, but that the authors describe what does happen in such passive, cliche-ridden, and spiritless prose that what little action there is takes on all the narrative power of a broken-down Mack truck. Here is a typical passage from Raymond Carver’s “Boxes”:
The question that has long puzzled me about stories of this kind is whether the authors of them truly believe that readers will manage to generate any enthusiasm for these kinds of dilemmas. Although it’s undeniable that some of the stories are trying to convey a legitimate message (why else focus on the tedious and difficult details of characters’ daily lives, if not to point out that daily life is tedious and difficult?), the fact remains that the stories are often so tedious themselves that we’re likely to stop reading them before the message has registered. Surely contemporary fiction writers, if they’re going to choose domestic life as their main territory, can manage to come up with slightly more powerful ways to depict the inevitable discussions about used furniture. It is as if short story writers, having decided to focus on inarticulate people, have concluded that they themselves don’t have to take the trouble to be articulate–that it is enough to wring one’s hands and show that one is pained by the difficulty of putting things into words. As Joy Williams, one of the writers included in this year’s collection, points out insightfully in her contributor’s note, “It’s bad enough we only have words to work with.”
The Best American Short Stories 1987 edited by Ann Beattie with Shannon Ravenel, Houghton Mifflin, $8.95.
