Other Americas

IT’S a truth universally acknowledged that hipster novelists in possession of good reputations must want to edit a literary anthology. Consider the co-editors of this collection: T Cooper’s most recent book, “Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes,” is an ambitious immigration saga, and Adam Mansbach’s latest is the acclaimed satirical novel “Angry Black White Boy.”

Now the pair have teamed with Akashic Books, the Brooklyn-based indie publishing company, on “A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing.” What exactly is a fictional history, readers may wonder. Why are huge chunks missing?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the book’s windy introduction, in which the editors prove more preoccupied with contemporary politics than with fiction or history. In a spirited but vague indictment of the government, they argue that the truth in current events is routinely converted into lies, which are then wedged into history books designed to bore the pants off 10th-graders. Although the editors provide no examples of these misdeeds, they hope to combat them with an anthology of stories about people and events that have long been ignored.

They pledge that these fictional counter-narratives will speak “for the voiceless” while their goal is “to challenge, tease, and expand upon the hegemonic single-narrative of mainstream American history.”

The volume contains 17 imaginative works -- two of which appear in comic-book style -- roughly organized along a timeline. In other words, it’s just another story collection but one whose contents, Cooper and Mansbach insist, are both entertaining and politically vital.

Are they? As with pretty much every contemporary fiction anthology, the quality ranges from good to OK to dreadful. The biggest challenge some selections pose is to the reader’s patience, as in Paul LaFarge’s “The Discovery of America,” which imagines explorers of various nationalities -- Icelanders, Phoenicians, Danes -- as each being the first to stumble on American soil. Dull, trifling and utterly lacking in such pesky narrative elements as character and plot, the piece reads like a humorless McSweeney’s reject.

Equally unapproachable is “The Anodyne Dreams of Various Imbeciles” by Peruvian American writer Daniel Alarcon. Set in the near future during a second U.S. civil war, the tale chronicles the widespread chaos triggered when the president’s amputated leg is stolen. It’s an intriguingly dark and offbeat premise, but Alarcon’s humdrum prose neutralizes any hint of dystopian warning.

Not every piece is such rough going. Mansbach’s is a restrained but resonant account of the real-life Ota Benga, a Pygmy bushman from the Congo who was displayed at the Bronx Zoo in the early 20th century. Narrated by a Jewish zookeeper, the story stays close to the facts while exploring questions about race that have become the writer’s stock in trade.

Thomas O’Malley’s “The Resurrection Men” is an affecting tale about a lonely 10-year-old boy’s obsession with astronauts, Catholicism and his mother’s Vietnam-veteran boyfriend. Ron Kovic, author of “Born on the Fourth of July,” delivers a brief hallucinatory fable called “The Recruiters” that is as effective as a book-length antiwar satire, and cartoonist Keith Knight offers droll social commentary in graphic form with “The Harlem Globetrotters.”

The standout story by a mile, though, is Amy Bloom’s “April 9, 1924.” Bloom understands that a short story is an intimation of a larger world, not a fragment or an assemblage of loose ends. Here she unleashes the full force of her confidence in a stirring immigration tale about a young Yiddish-speaking woman trying to survive in 1920s New York after enduring “a bad Breslov winter, the murder of her family, an ocean-crossing like a death march, intimate life with strangers in two rooms that smell of men and urine and fried food.” Although the author pounds familiar pavement here, her prose shimmers with originality.

Bloom’s keen storytelling throws the book’s weaker selections farther into the shadows of inconsequence. Benjamin Weissman’s “West,” a fantasy about cannibalism and other atrocities on the Oregon Trail, is yet another opportunity for this author to indulge his tiresome preoccupation with bodily functions, while Kate Bornstein’s “Dixie Belle: The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” in which Mark Twain’s hero undergoes an 1865-style gender reassignment, is equally puerile.

In both tales, the desire to shock outweighs the authors’ talent for provocation. In others, like Sarah Schulman’s dry portrait of a Holocaust-surviving psychoanalyst and Cooper’s “interview” with two men who have peripheral ties to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the prose is too static to raise eyebrows.

Perhaps most damaging to a venture that seeks to shake things up are the contributions -- by Neal Pollack, Valerie Miner, Felicia Luna Lemus, Darin Strauss and Alexander Chee -- that are not good or bad, exciting or dull, poignant or impassive. They dutifully hit their marks with a stiff, slow precision and are unlikely to incite anything more emotional from readers than a shrug.

Its editors undoubtedly hoped that “A Fictional History” would be the bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet, but it’s more of a faux-historical theme park. That’s a shame, because I wanted to be convinced by the passion of the enterprise, if not by its ideology.