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The current profusion in the writing and publishing of short stories is, so far as I can see, the most eventful literary phenomenon of our time. It has provided the tired blood of mainstream American letters with something new to think about and even—any day now, I suspect—something to take off from. (Where it’s going, of course, is anybody’s guess.) But whether or not such a claim can be permitted, the fact is the resurgence of interest in the short story has done nothing less than revitalize the national literature.

After reading, over a period of days, the nineteen stories chosen by the editors of this collection, I asked myself, “What am I remembering? What
should
I remember from these stories?” I think this has to be one of the tests of first-rate storytelling: are voice, situation, character and details handled so that they are memorable? And maybe, just maybe, even indelible. It so happens, in this case, that humor also played a large part in lifting the story I chose for first place out of the ranks of some otherwise fine and vigorous work. When I say humor I am not talking about “ha-ha” funny, either, although that sometimes enters in. Who doesn’t feel the world brighten when they’ve had a few good from-the-belly laughs? But what I’m appreciating here is the irreverence of the young which leads to a special kind of lightness and hilarity as soon as it comes into contact with so-called “adult” seriousness.

In “The Expendables,” by Antonya Nelson, the story I selected for first place in the collection, we see clearly too what it is that the best young writers have to offer—a kind of pizzazz, the love of undercurrent, of voyeuristic intensity, a bewildered fascination with ritual as it has been undermined in our time, yet sustained, too, in an oddly moving way. We also witness familial relationships from the bottom up.

The narrator of this story, a young man in charge of parking cars at his older sister’s second wedding (this time to a mafioso character), is someone trying to get a bead on what it is to grow up and make life-changing decisions. He’s aware of lives lived quite differently from those of his household as he observes an
extended family of Gypsies who live across the street. On the day of his sister’s wedding, there happens to be a funeral going on at the house of the Gypsies. The young man sees a coffin carried in and later he watches the cortege move down the street toward the nearby cemetery. Probably the energy and mystery of these juxtapositions—wedding and funeral, the business world of the young man’s hotel-owning father which borders the inexplicable mingling of the Gypsies on their paved-over lawn—go a long way toward adding dimension to a story which is disarmingly frontal in its telling. Add to this the narrator’s spontaneity of spirit and his uncanny sense of times past, present and future as they overlap, and you begin to see what’s special in this story. There’s a strong sense of scene coupled with the interior negotiations of the narrator. This leads to first-rate passages like the following in which the speaker cruises his cousin’s Spitfire through the cemetery where he first learned to drive:

Here, without the writer’s having laid it on, we are brought as readers to acknowledge the “convoluted circle” as it relates to life-and-death matters at large.

There are things that make the best stories hold up under a second reading, and one of these has to do with the inner circuitry between the actions and the meanings. In the story I’ve been discussing, one of these moments comes when the narrator notices how “pasty” his sister, the bride, looks. Her ex-husband then tries to reassure her, and, through him, the writer makes a verbal bridge to the neighboring funeral scene: “We’ll rouge
you before the big event,” the ex-husband tells Yvonne. “We’ll rouge you good.” It’s one of the pleasures of reading—picking up on the crossovers in the weave, and the best writers are working, as the jazz pianist Cecil Taylor says, not just horizontally, but vertically too—all of it effortlessly, intuitively.

How compelling is the voice in the story at hand? That’s another test of mine. Like most readers, I turn away from a whine or from the overly self-involved. I don’t waste time on smart alecks either. There has to be something at stake, something important working itself out from sentence to sentence. But, as with Chekhov’s stories, I prefer the light touch in this matter of how consequence is delivered. In “The Expendables” the central dilemma isn’t really the sister’s wedding to a jerk, but a sense of her disappearance as someone the narrator felt close to in his childhood who “always knew exactly what you meant when you said something.” It also more deeply involves the young man’s sudden glimpse into his father’s defeat so that the son actually takes on the father’s hardships for a few desperate moments: “I
was
him, I was my father and his life was happening to me.”

Likewise, in the story I’ve ranked second, “Bringing Joboy Back” by Paul Scott Malone, a strong aspect of the writing is how it draws the reader into a life whose burdens we begin to experience with empathy. The story negotiates a world all too familiar for women and for the black woman of this story in particular, a world in which trust and unspoken loyalties are sacrificed by male characters who use and misuse this female legacy as if it were their birthright. Hardly a new theme or revelation, but Malone makes it poignant by creating in Ruby, the main character, a woman we don’t just feel sorry for, but someone in whom we may recognize a striving against odds which intersects our own lives. A richness of texture and an ear for dialogue make this story stay in my mind. It is also encouraging to see a man representing a woman’s situation so confidently and truly, just as I felt glad to find a woman assuming fully the voice of the young man in “The Expendables.” A writer’s ability
to shed and assume sexual identities other than his or her own has inevitably to affect what we know and discover.

In my third choice, “Writing in the Dark” by Sandra Dorr, we meet a girl whose father fought in World War II. Through the girl’s relationship to her father we experience the terror and uncertainty of war, and the gap between what a child knows and what children are asked, often unreasonably, to endure in the lives of the parents they join. The story is a sensual and suggestive portrait of a family complex which includes the father’s mother, Clara, who has been left childlike by mental illness, yet who, in the narrator’s imagination, retains an unassailable richness and vitality of being. Here again we sense the importance of young writers who are often moved to reveal extremities, realities at either end of the spectrum—the gratuitously cruel or the phenomenon of innocence preserved against odds.

For short stories, all three of these stories are somewhat long, as are several others chosen by the editors, and it leads me to make a generalization about this collection and perhaps about story writing in America at large in 1988. It seems to me that there must be a healthy ambition afoot to extend the reach of stories past the ten-to-fifteen-page manuscript, perhaps toward a scope which takes advantage of what have been more novelistic strategies. In many of the stories included here we get a sense of characters more fully drawn and placed within a community or an extended family spectrum. The time-sense is less truncated than in the so-called “traditional narrative,” and we experience instead a feeling of times intersecting and overlapping for which added length seems a prerequisite. Primary and secondary characters as well as alternate lines of action are more likely to be developed in the longer short story.

When I think of three of Chekhov’s longer stories which I admire—“In the Ravine,” “The Lady with a Lapdog,” and “Ward No. 6” (which is sometimes called a novella)—I realize that the incentive to aspire to the rangier story has been there all along. It’s possible that the constraints of the so-called
“well-made” poem experienced in the last several years have also begun to be felt in the arena of the short story to some degree. That is, if this collection is any clue to what’s developing, young writers may have begun to prefer—or at least to explore—a more elastic territory for the short story, one that also dispenses, to some degree, with conclusiveness, and opts instead for the strengths of what we might call the tapestry of relationship and event. Granted, some unwieldy and patently boring stuff may be one of the hazards of such ambition. But, for the writer with guts and talent, the results can sometimes be invigorating for the whole prospect of the short story. In an essay on writing, I once advised story writers to “Get in, get out. Don’t linger.” I still think that holds as a pretty fair rule for the short stories I most enjoy reading. But we like to find ourselves surprised and liberated from our so-called “rules of thumb,” so it’s in such a spirit that I discover myself in a state of curiosity about the emergence of the long short story, a form I’ve worked with from time to time myself. I see this longer form as an important characteristic of the best stories in this anthology, and they have set me to wondering what is ahead for the short story in its current period of growth.

At the same time I focus on longer stories I realize there is no lack of fine representation here for the short story which holds to around fifteen manuscript pages and under. Ursula Hegi’s story, “Saving a Life,” about a young woman who dares herself toward the painful undertow of her dead mother’s passion for swimming in the river, has a wonderful economy and physical exactness about it. Michael Blaine’s “Suits” is a charmer. Its narrator is lively and wistful in a way that makes us remember when we were young, somebody’s niece or nephew, son or daughter, and life was more overheard and conjectured about than lived. “In the Garden” by Gordon Jackson brings together elements of mystery with those of the quotidian. It involves a young man’s loss of innocence when he realizes the promiscuity of the young girl who has just put the moves on him in the dark during a power outage at the Big Boy where they work.

Each of these stories centers around a loss which is made palpable and moving in a few scenes. In each there is something the narrator passionately desires. In other words, the stories I’m talking about are stories which
had
to be written, and this is already a high recommendation. The editors tell me they have made these choices in order to honor new and emerging writers. I too look at this anthology as a chance to experience new writers who are gaining a purchase on subject matter that belongs particularly to the young—stories which question and reevaluate the legacies of their elders. At the same time, I’m sensing the freedom of the young, that willingness to take chances; and this, truly, is a breath of fresh air for us all, writers and readers alike.

The big ones always get away. Think of Nick Adams’s lunker in “Big Two-Hearted River” and those heartbreakingly big line-busting trout in Norman Maclean’s
A River Runs through It
. Think of the archetypal fish story of them all,
Moby Dick
. The big ones get away, they have to, and when they do it brings you to grief. Usually. This new book by William Humphrey is the tale of a man who hooks and then loses the Big One, but who does not come to grief. Instead, he finds his life enlarged and enriched by the experience, and so are we by the telling.

In the best fiction—and William Humphrey has written his fair share—the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the “moved” character, the one to whom something happens in the story that
makes a difference
. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world. At the end of
My Moby Dick
, when the author tells us he is a changed man, we believe him. We have watched from beginning to end his dealings with a fish the size and appearance of which seem an awesome reminder of God’s presence in this world. It is a fish that causes the author to know love, fear, admiration, and a profound sense of the mysteriousness of this life.

It was given to “Bill”—as the author calls himself—and to no other man, to bear witness to a brown trout, “very possibly the record trout”—very possibly the largest brown trout in this world, or the next. I God! (That’s an expression some of the east Texas characters in Humphrey’s fictions are fond of using when they want to express amazement—or disbelief.)

Just how big is this fish? Where in the wide world is this extraordinary pursuit taking place? How come we’ve never heard of Bill’s fish before now? Something this big should have made the newspapers, not just the record books.

All this took place some years ago, Bill tells us, in the Berkshires, on a little slip of a stream dear to the hearts of Melville and the Hawthornes by the name of Shadow Brook. Bill speculates that the great fish must have washed downstream from a lake called Stockbridge Bowl during a flood. Stockbridge Bowl is near Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Once while Bill is casting for the big fellow he hears the distant thunder of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” rolling down from Tanglewood. “The music seemed to be coming from light-years off and so vast was the number of voices in the choir that had been assembled, it sounded like the hosts of heaven: ethereal harmony, music of the spheres.” Bill writes like this when he’s under the big fish’s influence. Listen: