Bolstering the Short Story

Abstract

Clouther continuedfrom previous page Michelle Regalado Deatrick's story "Backfire" hits its targets. The story is long and ambitious, with explosions and deaths. Like many of the stories, it deals with a father who does not always make wise decisions. Like many of the stories, it gets in an Fbomb . I can see why guesteditorJane Smiley selected it; I probably would have picked it from hundreds of submissions, too. But the story loses momentum in its final pages, and in the seven long pages between climax and lack of resolution, I lose confidence in the narrator—not so much that I don't believe him, but enough that I don't put down the book, shake my head, and say damn when I'm done. With the pleasant comes the regrettable, where the reader is wise to remember thatpart ofbeing a student is learning whatdoesn't work. In Matt Freidson's "Liberty," the Statue of Liberty is "blue jeans, rock and roll—green as dollars, her arm soaring up into the air like the guitar in 'Hotel California.'" Lesson learned: references to The Eagles don't save clichés. Gregory Plemmons's "Twinless" offers the following: "As I listened to the rain and jiggle of distant thunder on the windowpane, finally the rest of the signal wobbled on through, scratchy as an old record, the word suddenly flung forth from the darkness like a luminescentFrisbee as it shimmered across my brain." Metaphors aren't the strength of this anthology. One of the anthology's greatest strengths, however, is its diversity in approach. The familiar complaint about MFA programs producing the same story over and over is not realized here. In the first story, Jennifer Shaff's "Leave of Absence," the narrator is planning to visit outer space; in the second story,AmberDermont's"Lyndon," the narrator visits Lyndon Johnson's reconstructed birth site. Those are different trips. The next entry, Andrew Foster Altschul's "A New Kind of Gravity," takes place inside a shelter for abused women. Although each of the three stories shares a narrator doing his orherbest not to think about someone lost, where and how and why these narrators avoid these someones make the anthology interesting. It's a credit to Smiley's editing that she managed to assemble disparate voices mining such universal human feeling. Elsewhere, Smiley's editing is more suspect. Some of the stories are more concerned with cleverness than emotion. Albert E. Martinez's "Useless Beauty OR Notes on Esquire's 'Things a Man Should Never Do After the Age of 30'" takes as its organizing principle a list from a men's magazine. I suppose a story could transcend this framework, but why try in the first place? Jessica Anthony's "The Rust Preventer" centers on a forty-year-old man in love with a monkey. Nothing much happens in either of these stories. But here is the opening paragraph of my favorite story: On Christmas Eve, Dad came home from the mall and hammered up a bedsheet in the doorway to the living room. No one was allowed in, and there was crashing and cursing behind it. I had been scanning TV commercials for any last-minute gems I might have missed during my six weeks of Christmas requests, Mom was locking the windows, and my older sister, Lovely, was talking on the phone with her boyfriend, Roger, a kid who would mainly twist my ears whenever he saw me, saying, "Now hear this!" The story never slows, and I never lose my interest. When I finished it, I flipped back to the first page to read the name again. If Sean Ennis publishes a collection, I'll have the gratitude ofknowing I knew him back when. I'll be the insufferable guy insisting he liked The White Stripes after the first album, not the third. This is an anthology for the patient and optimistic. This might not be what the editors intended, but it's not a bad thing, either. Kevin Clouther teaches English at Bridgewater College of Virginia. Hisfirst novel isforthcomingfrom Algonquin Books. Bolstering the Short Story Christopher Coake The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 Edited by Laura Furman...