150 years of stories

Press, 21 April 1984, Page 20

150 years of stories

Major American Short Stories. Edited . by A. Walton Litz. Oxford University Press, 1983. 831 pp. $23.95. : (Reviewed by Owen Marshall) This collection is a revised edition of a very successful anthology. It is a book deliberately structured as an American university text, and has the advantages and disadvantages inherent in that structure. The stories are presented in groups on the basis of chronology and form. Each section has its introductory editorial essay in which the distinctive characteristics of each author, and the relationships of the stories one to another, are suggested to us. The book concludes with a section of biographical and bibliographical notes. It is an approach which is earnest and worth while, yet at times tends to diminish the spontaneity and individuality of stories. The final essay ends with a recognisable course conclusion; rather glib and typical of the emphasis on a symmetry of literary criticism. “Barth’s fascination with the Thousand Nights And A Night brings us full circle, to Irving’s preoccupation with folk narratives and Poe’s admiration for Gothic intricacy, and reminds us that whatever form the short fiction may take in the future, it

will never stray too far from its traditional origins in story.” A collection of this significance, over 800 pages and ranging in time from 1819 to 1977, invites from readers and reviewers comment concerning the stories and authors chosen. I am not sufficiently familiar with the gamut of American short fiction to make a judgment, but the selection does appear sound and is supported by the success of the first edition. I was disappointed at the omission of William Saroyan and J. D. Salinger. So significant has the short story been in American culture that Frank O’Connor termed it “a national art form,” and Litz supports the idea that the short story presents the most coherent record of America’s literary and social development. Certainly this collection illustrates the development of literary form — from the ponderous and porous beginnings in Irving and Hawthorne, to the cryptic work of Robert Coover and the revelatory stories of Grace Paley. Hawthorne’s writing is difficult to read today: mannered, pompous, often dull. Yet perhaps the stories which we admire now will also be dismissed as soporific if they are read in the twenty-second century. A concentrated diet of short stories, some familiar and some new, is not an ideal basis for criticism, yet interesting impressions do emerge. How lithe the modern American short story has become in comparison with its forbears; how much greater its sense of urgency, how much more openly concerned with the authors personality; and how significant as a vehicle for minority expression. Work by James Baldwin, John Cheever, John Barth, Donald , Barthelme, as well as that by Coover and Paley, is evidence of the vigour and variety of the modem American short story, and good enough reason for buying this book, even if you are not contemplating enrolling at Princeton or San Diego State.