Minimal Tales of Maximal Impact :...

At the end of this century we embrace the short story (and the newer short short story of a mere two or three pages), some say because it fits into our lives of easy consumption, neat packaging and over-scheduled time, or because the spread of parvenu taste has taken its toll and like television, turned us toward more intense, minimal tales.

But the popularity of the short story seems much more complex than this, harking back to the beginnings of the genre, when its purpose was didactic. Stories function as parables today. We read them not solely for diversion but also to discover the answer to this question: How can we make our own experience come out right? They are reports--immediate in tone, sometimes urgent--on the state of culture and individuals. The short story is perhaps the most topical, as well as the most accessible, of all our literary genres.

The modern story owes much to Cervantes, whose singular concern was to explore the nature of man’s secular existence, and, of course, also to Chekhov, because even when nothing appeared to be happening in his stories, much was revealed about the characters and the quality of their life. (One critic writes of Chekhov--”He says, simply, ‘You live badly, ladies and gentlemen,’ but his smile has the indulgence of a very wise man.”)

Of the three contemporary collections of stories under consideration here, two are quite purely American--”The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses,” and “Best of the West 2: New Short Stories From the Wide Side of the Missouri.”

The third--and arguably the most interesting--anthology, “Sudden Fiction International: Sixty Short-Short Stories,” is composed of very condensed tales from writers worldwide: literature described as “brief, reticent, meticulous,” and one might also add, very exotic.

Like photography in the second half of the last century, the stories in “Sudden Fiction” have a way of working as a travelogue. These stories picture lives in distant lands in a way that makes it seem as if we know nothing of the people in these places.

Here, for instance, is Paule Barton (b. 1916), a writer who has spent most of his life as a goatherd in Haiti, opening his deeply-imagined story “Emilie Plead Choose One Egg”:

“Emilie was talking with Belem while looking at the gathered cloud of nesting birds. ‘Which bird going to hatch today’s woe, guess that?’ Emilie said, she said, ‘I’ll carry that egg to the man who took my donkey for my debt, I’ll give that a breakfast gift!’

“ ‘The tax man?’ Belem said.

“Emilie said, ‘That’s it, you guessing good today,’ she said. ‘Now guess which egg woe is in.’

“Belem said, ‘How can I guess? Look how many eggs there look!’

“ ‘Got to make choices in this life,’ Emilie said. ‘Each morning a riddle to untie the knot of it, and then use that rope to tie up bad luck thinking to any tree here.’ ”

No matter how many electronic images are flashed to us showing New Zealand, Haiti, China, or Czechoslovakia, they cannot convey the imaginative life as these stories do. If short stories are, as Irish writer Frank O’Connor, claims, a “means for submerged population groups” to address a dominating community, then in “Sudden Fiction International,” the emergence of voices challenges the concept of a world supposedly leveled by Big Macs and macrobytes. Emilie’s tax man is an infinitely more interesting way of seeing the commonality.

From India, Krishnan Varma’s “The Grass-Eaters” is as savagely funny a tale as can be imagined, and New Zealander Patricia Grace’s “At the River” as beautiful as an ancient Ainu song. Jeanette Winterson’s “Orion” was so powerful I instantly set about locating more of this Englishwoman’s work. Even an American writer, Kenneth Bernard, writes so outside the literary mainstream that the result is a wonderful meditation on appearance and values which sounds completely fresh. “Sudden Fiction International” is a winning anthology, a fine book for a winter’s eve. Tale after tale rewards. You’ll find Cortazar, Atwood and Narayan; Lessing, Dinesen and Calvino; Marquez, Mukherjee, and Babel, as well as a host of unknown writers--60 stories in all, each of a length, incidentally, that makes them ideal for reading aloud to family and friends.

“Best of the West 2” from Peregrine Smith Books presents patches of very good writing by authors from whom we expect such things (Jim Harrison, Louise Erdrich, William Kitteredge) mixed with a rougher, less-sure-of-itself variety, but the overall anthology has a lot to recommend it. Ann Cummins’ “Bitterwater” is a fine tale, violent and disturbing, about the marriage of Manny and Brenda, a Navajo and a Caucasian, wrecked by alcoholism. “Wickedness,” by Ron Hansen, is set during a Nebraska blizzard of 1888, and the storm itself takes on the presence of a character--beautiful work filled with poetry. And for sheer quirkiness, John Bennion’s “Dust,” which deals with loss, the earth, ancestral land and the way a group of Mormon polygamists explains heaven (it’s “on a planet near Kolob, a hundred trillion miles past our sun. God lives there . . .”) shows fierce originality.

The question: Can a bunch of stories about the west add up to something? The answer: Yes, more good yarns, this time about home.

“In thinking about matters of audience, of one thing I’m certain and this is that if a new and larger readership for the best writing is to be found in America it will be discovered and nourished by the small presses . . .”

So writes Tess Gallagher in her introduction to the 1989/90 Pushcart anthology--poetry, stories and essays culled from small magazines. The Pushcart is dedicated this year to Raymond Carver, whom Gallagher knew so well. She imparts a great sense of that familiarity in her essay, which is almost worth the price of the book. “Ray was that rare creature--a writer who reads,” Gallagher reports, and this apparently included a faithful reading of small-press quarterlies, which makes him an even rarer creature.

Two of the best stories in the book are in the introduction, and they both are about “Ray,” one an account of his getting a haircut from a man recently paralyzed by a stroke, the other a story of coming to a stranger’s aid in the middle of the night in a Los Angeles hotel. They reveal much about the writer’s kindness and optimism.

Other selections stand out, such as Charles Baxter’s story “Westland”: It opens with a teen-age girl asking a man at the zoo, “What would you do if I shot that lion?” and depicts the violent crumbling of reason which also can be read as an onset of sanity in a ravaged world. This is literature at its best. “Playing Chess With Arthur Koestler” by Julian Barnes is a riveting piece of nonfiction, as is Edward Hoaglund’s “Learning to Eat Soup.” There are fine poems--”Explanations” by Judson Mitcham and “At A Motel” by Brenda Hillman. One would have to suffer from myopia not to see the richness in this volume.

“The discovery of neighboring, intersecting and opposing worlds” is what Gallagher thinks small-press publishing is all about. It takes a certain kind of reader to sustain this world, one with the openness and decisiveness necessary for approaching new writing. Clearly Carver had that openness. Here, perhaps, is a pointer for the rest of us.