The State of the Story :...

If you are a reader who finds the real excitement of a story is in the language of the story, in the story sounding like no other story you have come upon--a voice you may not love but cannot shake--if you are that reader, you will be disappointed in, ultimately baffled by, many of the selections in the 69th edition of “Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards,” touted as the year’s best.

The year’s best? Then where is Michael Cunningham’s “White Angel”? In “The Best American Short Stories 1989,” that’s where. Or Chris Spain’s “Entrepreneurs”? In “The Pushcart Prize XIII.” Mark Richard’s “Happiness of the Garden Variety”? In “New Stories From the South: The Year’s Best,” and “Pushcart.”

What the O. Henry collection has in common with a good half dozen anthologies being published this year is Rick Bass, the young heir to Barry Hannah. “The Watch,” Bass’ 40-page entry here, is the rich and visual story of a young man in the piney woods of Mississippi trying to capture his renegade father who is in hiding in a swamp with a harem of the town’s abused wives. Everything in this fantastic tableau is rendered viscerally--the deadly mosquitoes, the alligator fat, the pressure of unshared stories building up in the father’s son.

“The Watch” brings much-needed energy to a group of stories that is often curiously dated, fusty. The big mystery is why Ernest J. Finney’s “Peacocks” was awarded first prize. One must work to get past the tone set by this numbing tale of a crude backwoods family complete with a pregnant wife who gets slapped around by her husband.

Second and third prizes went, respectively, to “House Hunting,” a disquieting story by Joyce Carol Oates, and to “Edie: A Life,” Harriet Doerr’s straightforward account of the life of one English nanny that comes to an unexpectedly dreamy close.

Jean Ross follows Harriet Doerr with “The Sky Fading Upward to Yellow: A Footnote to Literary History,” in which she captures exactly the self-importance of a peripheral figure in the life of a famous person, here a college student who had an affair with a now deceased writer. As the young woman debates over the years whether or not to release her diaries and letters to a biographer who hasn’t even asked for them, the reader cringes along with her weary friends.

T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “Sinking House” also works very well. An elderly woman leaves her dead husband’s bedside and methodically turns on every faucet in the house, plus the sprinklers. The young couple next door, a near-parody of affluent chic, is drawn in when their own house begins to sink into the earth that has become “like chocolate pudding.”

Getting from Ross to Boyle is slow going, though, particularly in “History,” a tired reminiscence of an interracial marriage in the ‘60s South that offers no fresh insights into such a charged alliance.

James Salter demonstrates his usual elegance with a chill description of two youngish lawyers traveling in Italy in “American Express.” Shortly before Frank picks up an Italian schoolgirl the men will soon share, Alan observes about his friend: “Something was missing in him, and women had always done anything to find out what it was.”

There are also accomplished stories by John Casey (“Avid”) and Charles Dickinson (“Child in the Leaves”) separated by stories that would be fairly harmless if they were not being held up as models of the genre.

For the last 22 years, one editor has selected the O. Henry Award stories. Gloria Norris ensures a wider range of style in “New American Short Stories 2” by inviting writers to pick their own best or favorite story, and to explain why. Thus we learn that a delightful story by Veronica Geng, “A Lot in Common,” was written as a birthday present for a friend with the same birthday as her own.

In this collection, Mona Simpson is like my friend at the girls’ school I attended who, because she was so much smarter than any of the rest of us, had to be graded separately so as not to destroy the curve. “Lawns” has it all--it is deeply felt (as are many entries in this anthology), truly startling, funny, wrenching. A college freshman tries to make a new life away from home and her incestuous father. The narrator, tough but damaged, recalls that, “My dad thought he was getting away with something but he didn’t. He was the one that fell in love, not me.”

Another story that features an excruciatingly burdened child is Russell Banks’ “Queen for a Day.” Here a boy is made to be the man of the family when his father deserts them. And Rick Bass chooses “Wejumpka” as his personal favorite (It is mine, too). It is both funny and poignant in its presentation of a young boy with an exaggerated need to hold on to whoever and whatever greets him.

Bob Shacochis weighs in with “Squirrelly’s Grouper,” a robust “fish story” set on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. A prep school exploit in “Smorgasbord” is notable for what author Tobias Wolff describes as “the corruption of love, the making of a friend, almost in the same instant. . . .”

Also in this collection: quintessential Bobbie Ann Mason and Frederick Barthelme, classic Peter Taylor, and strong and varied stories by Larry Brown, Andre Dubus, Max Apple--20 in all.