"He's eighty-four if he's a day," C.W. adds.
"You couldn't miss him in that white suit," Betty says. "I'm sure it was him. Oh, Joe! He had a walking stick. He went strutting along--"
"No kidding!"
"He probably beats chickens to death with it," says Holly, who is standing around.
AFTER the hard but enjoyable labor of reading these little miracles, it seems a shame that the entire list can't be instantly awarded a place on the shelf next to the well thumbed offerings of de Maupassant, Chekhov, and Lawrence. Yet as Tyler cautions in her introductions, while a mediocre novel can fashion a place, a memory sheerly through fulsome persistance, even a very good short story is ephemeral. The Best American Short Stories is proud of its egalitarianism--unlike Prize Stories, it doesn't pick first, second, and third prizes. But this is faintly spurious democracy: we make our own choices and rankings, and even Tyler admits that she would bestow larger laurels on four of the 20.
Four is a small banquet, but readers can choose for themselves how many stories they wish to return to, and the menu is certainly extensive. Established masters Updike, Carver, Wright Morris, and LeGuin are joined by rising talents like Laurie Colwin and Bobbie Ann Mason, as well as a host of freshman including, curiously, James Bond.
Furthermore, readers can come away with the encouraging feeling that these new bleak writers possess such audacity and conviction that we may have to find them a more encompassing--and cheerful--name. With Juck, we can put the timid shibboleth "Post Modernism" behind us at the same time: when authors like Carol Bly look to the future they invoke a visionary power that threatens to dilate into a new brand of fiction, one in which the characters as well as the audience are party to the author's hopes, secrets, and best-guesses. Though cantankerous, disheveled Svea dies early in Bly's "The Dignity of Life," she rises in memory like a hazy phoenix, growing slowly clearer in the author's conception:
Sometimes she stood the way poor people stand, elbow bent, one hand placed on one irregular hip, and the face gazing past the immediate farmyard, as if to say "There is life beyond this paltry place--I have my eyes on it."
BY INSPIRING PLEASURE in what is seen and heard, good fiction has always taught us how to watch and listen. Larry Woiwode's "Firstborn" is the final story in the volume--by alphabetical quirk--and it is a fitting finale. In portraying the emotional schooling of his hero, Cnaries, Worwode educates the reader as well, and provides a natural jumping off point for the stories and collections to come. The death of his first boy in childbirth has clouded Charles's outlook, but he endures in the face of grave trials and doubts, and his blind obdurance is rewarded just as satisfyingly as it was in the primers of our youth. After his fourth child slips easily into the world and begins to run about with his hair streaming in the wind. Charles can at last look on the world "with less darkness in his eyes: that is [he] began at last to be able to begin again to see."