O. Henry Shorts [Book Review]
In her introduction, Furman speaks of the “immediacy of the short story.” It’s that immediacy—the feeling of being briefly sucked in to a world all its own and spit back out within the span of a half hour or so—that makes reading short fiction so appealing, particularly for the Internet-addicted, Twitter-plagued mind. And it’s a testament to the quality of this collection that, despite their brevity, these stories lodge themselves in your consciousness, sear images into your brain, follow you around for days like twenty brain-hungry zombies. Working in a form that’s older than Aesop, these writers have each managed to come up with something unique, pertinent, memorable, or a combination thereof.
In some, it’s a striking character that stays around. The protagonist of E.V. Slate’s “Purple Bamboo Garden,” an elderly nanny to a wealthy Beijing family, seems simple enough at first: impoverished, docile, innocently excited about accompanying the family she serves on a Sunday trip, even though it’s her day off and her friends tell her she’s only going to look after baby. But then the nanny brazenly contradicts and argues with her mistress. She glances haughtily at people of her own ilk while riding in the family’s car. She reveals her loathsome callousness to her own estranged daughter, and imposes herself in her mistress’s private affairs, leading to disaster. And in doing these things, the nanny becomes all the more offensively lifelike: Slate crushes the reader’s first impression of the character, turning her into a dislikable, contradictory, and completely believable woman.
Other stories subvert expectations on an even deeper level, such as Graham Joyce’s “An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen.” Joyce’s story is the star of the collection, and deservedly so. Three jurors—A.S. Byatt, Anthony Doerr, and Tim O'Brien (another Austinite)—read all twenty stories blind and selected their favorites; O’Brien and Byatt both chose this one. It’s the story of a Seamus Todd, a British color sergeant leading his men through the blistering Saudi Arabian desert during the Gulf War. At first it seems we have the common elements of realistic war fiction—the grating boredom and frazzled nerves, the horror of decaying, oozing corpses, the jocular camaraderie among soldiers in the face of death. But them Seamus, our narrator and a well-adjusted, likeable chap, becomes separated from his men and steps on a landmine. If he moves, he’ll explode. As he stands alone in the desert, pressing his foot into the sand, the story swerves from its course and becomes about a thousand times more interesting: Seamus meets someone or something—possibly a djinn—that saves his life, and this mystical encounter dogs the remainder of his tragic civilian life. What begins as a familiar setup gracefully and unexpectedly shifts to a singularly haunting portrait of the plight of war veterans. As Byatt points out in her commentary, it’s often taught that short stories should convey a “single impression, or a concentrated action,” but “An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen” defies this dictum, and succeeds in its expansiveness and in the thorny, twisted path down which it leads the reader.
We could go on: the bizarre catechism device used by Andrew Sean Greer in his apocalyptic queer love story, “Darkness”; the versatile, sobering Titanic metaphor of Alistair Morgan’s “Icebergs”; the crocodile tears employed by a mother to coax her runaway daughter just within grabbing distance in Junot Diaz’s “Wildwood” (which, by the way, also serves as the second chapter of Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—something not mentioned anywhere in this book). Stale moments are few and far between. It’s worth picking this book up to experience these carefully chosen exercises in narrative economy, and to witness the way they reverberate with one another in such close quarters.
Included in the back of the volume are brief comments from the jurors on their selections, and a note from the authors on their inspiration for their stories. It’s kind of like figuring out how David Blaine levitates to witness some of the writers speak so specifically about their work: it deflates the mystery of the story slightly, but it’s also valuable information to the aspiring practitioner.
