BOOK REVIEW : Short Stories With the Best of Everything

The Kneeling Bus by Beverly Coyle (Ticknor & Fields: $18.95; 180 pages).

These stories are perfection. Short stories don’t get any better than this.

Beverly Coyle is as much a dancer as a writer--not a dancer like Fred Astaire but more like Gregory Hines: large in concept, totally full of surprises in how any story turns out, and an absolute master of craft. You never catch Beverly Coyle “performing,” you only feel the story unfold, inside you, as you read it. This work is the best, the best, the best.

The problem as a reviewer is how to talk about these eight perfect stories without (a) giving away any of their wild, crazy, thoroughbred beauty, and (b) allowing a reader a chance to preclassify this work, to stick it into categories; to tarnish it, make it accessible, easy to “understand.”

For instance: These stories are by a woman. So they must be about women and children and disease and angst , sort of like Joy Williams, right? Wrong. They’re about the South; they have mangoes and alligators and some poverty in them, and they’re good, so they must be like Flannery O’Connor or Eudora Welty, right? Wrong! They touch upon matters of faith and God and youth, so they could be like the young Philip Roth, right? No. Wrong, wrong. They make you double up with laughter on Page One and keep you that way 33% of the time, so they might be like the late Max Shulman’s best stuff? No. Not even that.

These stories have to do with Protestant faith. Sudden death. Characters who are so sweet that when they die, you cry. But I’m not going to say one more thing. Except that there is a love story in which the Reverend Doctor Norman Vincent Peale is a major player. And one sentence in which academic tenure is compared to plastic surgery. And some stuff about a baptism that really does have a Max Shulman or H. Allen Smith feeling to it, material that takes you out of yourself so that the person you hear howling alone in the middle of the room with only a book for company is you.

And I can say that this book talks of family with love and exasperation and longing you can cut like a lemon meringue pie. And talks of God and his relative absence or presence with a full and entire sense of how good humans can be, whether there’s a God looking after us or not. Beverly Coyle is a meticulous Wallace Stevens scholar; perhaps she’s learned from that mighty poet that leaving things out is everything, so that every word in this collection is as solid and as necessary as a perfectly polished stone in a renaissance mosaic.

Even more to the point: Sometimes writers, and writing students, get discouraged. A month ago, in the Middle West, a visiting editor from a publishing house in New York told a group of writing students that there was no real point in devoting one’s life to that vocation. Fiction, he opined, what we call “serious fiction,” was something like dinosaurs, old and dopey and stupid and out. The bottom line now was everything. Best sellers like John Jakes were everything. The great thing now was to ghost-write--for some NFL quarterback, or a television actress, or a first lady, or a first lady’s dog.

These young people--he didn’t mean to be discouraging--were wasting their time, capisce ?

Yes, we do live in a world where the fake memoirs of a dog can find a ready market. Yes, all that is true, everything that man said.

But what is also true is: There are people like Beverly Coyle in this world, who sail in and out of nowhere with books full of perfect, dazzling stories that show you the world in a way you’ve never ever seen before.

Coyle’s kind of work is like a kiss. You can’t measure its worth. It has no bottom line. It expands as far as the soul can see, into infinity.

Tuesday: Lee Dembart reviews “The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness” by Gerald M. Edelman (Basic Books).