Short People

By R. Z. Sheppard

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 1978

Edited by Ted Solotaroff

Houghton Mifflin; 398 pages; $10.95

PRIZE STORIES 1979: THE O. HENRY AWARDS

Edited by William Abrahams

Doubleday; 334 pages; $10

The short story is like an old friend who calls whenever he is in town. We are happy to hear from it, we casually fan the embers of past intimacies, buy it lunch. But we seem to have less in common these days. It is a bit of an embarrassment. The short story is earnest and intense as always. It is hard to tell it that movies are more fun. And there are other reasons for unease: the short story is a financial failure and its domestic life is a mess. Most of the old mass magazines that once made room for fiction are gone. The few that remain seem to prefer a composite of facts stapled with fictional techniques. During its fleeting life (1967-78), American Review established new boundaries and definitions for its writers. Editor Ted Solotaroff stopped using the term short story and simply called anything that wasn't poetry prose. He also had excellent taste.

The so-called little magazines remain hospitable. But they are remote, academic and, well, little. Harper's and the Atlantic still keep the faith, as do The New Yorker and a few others. Then there are acts of ritual: the two leading short-story anthologies that publish what their editors deem the worthiest efforts of the previous year. The Best American Short Stories 1978 is the first edition in 37 years not edited by Martha Foley, who died in 1977. The final selections were made by Solotaroff. It is an outstanding collection with at least two stories that continue to reverberate: Leslie Epstein's Skaters on Wood, a startling tale about Polish Jews staging Macbeth before being rounded up by the Nazis; and Gilbert Sorrentino's Decades, a piece of superbly controlled drollery about a blue-collar New Yorker on the fringes of literary culture.

Prize Stories 1979: The O. Henry Awards contains no such surprises. It is a solid, predictable gathering with one interesting sociological twist. Most of the stories are about failing marriages. Three reasons suggest themselves: more writers are writing about what they know, and what they know is failing marriages; the subject is particularly appealing to the editor; or both.

In any event, the latest Prize Stories rely heavily on a familiar tone of disillusion. The man whose business fails and wife leaves him, the writer whose wife runs off with a Terry-Thomas Englishman, the couple who discover they enjoy sex more after their divorce, have all passed this way before.

There are two exceptions. Lynne Sharon Schwartz's Rough Strife is a shrewd and sensitively contoured exploration of young marriage and pregnancy. It appears in both the O. Henry and Best collections. Julie Hecht's I Want You, I Need You, I Love You is a stylishly intelligent and deceptively lighthearted evocation of a woman's fantasies about Elvis Presley. Hecht strikes the right balance of irony, nostalgia and affection for a time when Presley and the short story itself were still in full bloom.

--R.Z. Sheppard

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