Purpose joined with talent

American novelists and story writers are suddenly facing the jeering and bickering diminishing the rest of the culture. The vehement reviewer Dale Peck raises his hatchet over colleagues who happen to be his most potent competition, while novelist and literary magazine editor Heidi Julavits, in a lengthy protest against “snarkiness” in the pages of “The Believer,” finds little good in criticism that is too critical. The Web pages of Amazon.com have become literature’s pro-wrestling arena, as authors’ friends and enemies rave, roar and body-slam. Isn’t it still possible, in these interesting times, to open a book without getting into a brawl?

“The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories” suggests that it is. Reprinting 29 stories from widely and lesser-known authors, it confirms that such shouting and shoving have little, if anything, to do with literature’s quality and integrity.

“If we are made by what we read,” the collection’s editor, Ben Marcus (himself one of the most interesting writers of our day), writes in his introduction, “if language truly builds people into what they are, how they think, the depth with which they feel, then these stories are, to me, premium material for that construction project. You could build a civilization with them. They are toolkits for the future.”

Marcus is not a propagandist for any one kind of writing. Readers who prefer the offbeat or the autobiographical, the plot- or personality-driven, the tale or the monologue, will find satisfaction in his collection. It’s a vindication of Marcus’ approach that the two strongest pieces are so different from each other: an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” and Anthony Doerr’s “The Caretaker.”

I’ll get to Wallace in a moment, but first to Doerr, whose long tale centers on a complacent African man whose hardworking mother departs for the village market one morning and never returns. The son’s search draws him into revolution, murder and an escape to the Pacific Northwest. It is only then that the full catastrophe of his life and the choices he could have made nearly cause him to implode. Giving any more details would weaken the effect of this story, full of piercingly true language, poignant events and a consciousness of what fiction can do at its best: not only innovate but enlighten, not only be read by the reader but read its reader, interacting with the unique conscience and history of each.

Some of this collection’s best pieces are the most straightforward. It’s not just that Mary Gaitskill’s “Tiny, Smiling Daddy” is an easier read, it’s also that Gaitskill’s observations within this familiar situation and format (father confronted by his grown daughter, re-scans troubled memories of the past) are fresh and affecting. Deborah Eisenberg (an admired New Yorker contributor) is perhaps the most “establishment” of the authors included, but this hasn’t stopped Marcus from reprinting her “Someone to Talk To,” in which Third World violence is witnessed by an American pianist plunked into a Latin American country in upheaval.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” in terms of its style, could have been written decades ago -- it’s the identity and situation of its narrator (a young Indian girl growing up in New England) and her story of a Bangladeshi family friend who regularly comes to dinner, the fate of his own wife and daughters in his war-torn homeland silently ever-present, that win Lahiri’s story an aura that feels new rather than formulaic.

Such successes question the supremacy of innovative style as the mark of fictional distinction. For most of the last half-century, analyzing the formal structures of a novel or story was the central critical interest -- whether to dissect them (the New Critics) or find new relevance in them (postmodernists and various identity theorists) and then attack and debunk them. Substance, worldview, integrity and authenticity -- not just of story and theme but of how they come together through the deployment of structure and language -- often became discounted in favor of politics and “style” (however defined). Yet do we really read Dostoevski only to savor his style? (And how well does translation preserve style, anyway?) Does “Moby-Dick” offer nothing but ahead-of-its-time challengings of gender and culture, and foreshadowings of literary styles discovered by critics adept at finding them? Is something always better because it’s different, transgressive or easy to pin a new label on?

In some of the stories collected here, standing out in the fictional crowd seems more important to their authors than anything else. Diane Williams, for example, has her admirers, but “All American” simply confirms for me that she offers too little besides abbreviated length and urgent tempo to sustain interest. Pervasive self-awareness of diction, subject, structure and omissions (scant context and characters) convey little else but their own unusualness. Gordon Lish, in his influential writing classes, almost never had his students’ entire stories read aloud and discussed; the reader was stopped once his words lost the teacher’s interest, even if Lish’s interest flagged in the middle of the first sentence. Fiction became the ability to throttle your reader from word one -- not a plausible position readers or writers can hold for long. (Poe is the only American who managed it.)

I am not arguing for “accessible” (as in conventional) fiction; I am no Tom Wolfe or James Wood, you’re not reading the New Republic, and it wasn’t long ago that writers like Gaitskill and Eisenberg were not considered mainstream. But the best works in this collection demonstrate, in unusual and familiar ways, a synthesis of style, theme, action and character, this organic quality convincing the reader that the story’s time and place have become his own, while at the same time uncovering correlatives in the story of each reader’s life.

Rick Bass’ “Field Events” demonstrates this virtue: It’s a very beautiful tale of a family’s rejuvenation through a mysterious, almost magical, strong man. He befriends the sons of the house (young athletes), brings love to one of the sisters and inspires the mother into almost believing he’s a lost son. Then Bass pulls back from his fairy tale’s traditional happy ending. At first his ending infuriated me, but as days passed I became reconciled to it, reminded that some of our most precious experiences are the ones we cannot categorize, the ones that never end.

Some of this anthology’s keenest pleasures come from discovering little-known authors, like Matthew Derby and “The Sound Gun,” Brian Evenson and “Two Brothers,” George Saunders and “Sea Oak,” and William Gay and “The Paperhanger.” Derby and Evenson create chilling worlds of violence and death that should be read. Saunders’ story is a wild re-imagining of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” in lower-class America; as in Gogol, readers will cringe with horror and laugh out loud at this story of death-defying conspicuous consumption, although the larger social context and satire Gogol caught aren’t as evident. “The Paperhanger” shows how the disappearance of a child becomes the center of a collapsing world that makes sense again only by the snap that solves the mystery and elevates the story to one of genuine, tragic insight.

Still, American fiction became great by taking risks and (often only eventually) honoring risk-takers. Since the 1996 publication of “Infinite Jest,” vultures have circled over Wallace’s career; his “Brief Interviews” remind us of how genuine and indelible a talent Wallace is. Has there been any novelist since Italo Svevo or Samuel Beckett so skilled at finding the comedy in obsession, dissolution and melancholy? Like those authors, Wallace creates voices whose determined speech and unmitigated weirdness drag us into their worlds. The first “interview,” a transcript of the talk of a mental patient who believes he can stop time so as to masturbate freely is awesome in its conviction, humor and lonely authority. (As in Beckett, a Wallace laugh usually precedes a sigh of recognition.) In this story there is a marriage of virtuosity and inspiration, as well as an integrity that tells only what is absolutely true to the speaker’s (and his author’s) situation; the story is at once new and classic.

This is what we look for when we search for the next big book or writer, and what we recognize (or fail to find) in older books we are told to regard as great. Marcus’ anthology assures us that the makers of American fiction often remain true to their own art and to that art’s tradition. Whether they can any longer be valued -- let alone noticed -- by a culture with too little time for anything but the brightest, swiftest and most high-rated sensation is another question that authors -- and readers -- need to begin debating. *