FICTION

THE RICHER, THE POORER: Stories, Sketches, Reminiscences by Dorothy West (Doubleday: $22; 254 pp.). Until her second novel, “The Wedding,” was published a few months ago, Dorothy West had gone virtually undetected by literary radar for 45 years. She was publishing mostly in her local newspaper, the Vineyard Gazette of Martha’s Vineyard and many of the tales collected here, fiction as well as nonfiction, are from that publication. Every one carries West’s strong, distinctive, unsentimental voice. The last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, West writes like a social historian, capturing significant moments that seem to alter lives forever or change nothing at all: the new fence that divides neighbors, the appearance of an almost-white baby in a black household, a child’s first encounter with death or with forgiveness. Most of these small-scale stories bear some pearl of wisdom, but two of the best were written more than 50 years ago, one of them when West was just 17 years old (and for which she and Zora Neale Hurston shared second prize in a story contest). In “The Typewriter” (1926), a girl practices her office skills by having her father, a janitor, dictate imaginary business letters. He becomes secretly consumed by those moments he can pretend to be a peer of Rockefeller and Morgan. In “Jack in the Pot” (1940), a woman discovers that winning $50 at bingo can be a curse to a family on welfare, enough to open the doors to fantasy but too little to make a lasting difference. West grew up in a relatively affluent Boston family, but you wouldn’t know it from most of these stories; the best deal with troubled, marginal lives, West having learned from her once-poor mother “how much it costs to be poor.”