Short & Sour

FICTION OF THE FIFTIES (383 pp.)--Edited by Herbert Gold--Doubleday ($3.95).

When Editor Herbert Gold polled the writers in this anthology about the special problems of writing in the '505, they responded with heart-quickening uniformity. "I would say," says one, "that the problem of writing fiction in this decade is basically no different from writing in the past." Fortunately, the short stories are a good deal better than the communal preface by their authors. The special atmosphere of the '505 is evoked by a collection whose average of competence is commendably high and whose index of brilliance is somewhat low. It is tempting to moralize that this very flatness is a quality of the decade; more probably, it is only a characteristic of short-story collections.

Woodworking Works. Disaffection with the times is the common ingredient. Predictably, the writer who has mixed the smoothest cup of brine is The New Yorker's John Cheever. With his oft-repeated visions of suburbia under a lowering sky, the author is obviously following Faulkner's lead by creating a kind of Yoknapatawpha, Conn. The fact that there are no Snopeses and not even very much crab grass in the commuters' heaven adds wry emphasis to Cheever's reiterated question. "Is this all there is?" ask his characters, who have everything. In The Country Husband, the author's answer (yes) is given with great irony to a prosperous executive who lusts for his teen-age baby sitter. Being a decent man, he asks for psychiatric help and is advised to take up woodworking. The ending is a masterpiece of horror: the cure is successful.

But one of the pieces that makes the anthology well worth attention is one of Gold's own, Love and Like. The author examines a young man who is trying to put his life back together a few weeks after a shattering divorce. He seems to be succeeding until, at story's end, an idea is seen at the periphery of his mind, the more horrifying because it has been so thoroughly excluded from his conscious thoughts. It is the idea of suicide. Another story whose effect lingers after the pages have been turned is Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel, an understated, poignant account of a Jewish marriage broker, his errant daughter, and a wife-seeking young rabbi.

Razor's Edge. By far the best story in the book is George P. Elliott's satire, Among the Dangs. The Bangs are a homicidal South American tribe and the reluctant adventurer conned into going among them is a penniless college student who has taken an anthropology course, and who further qualifies, as he notes, by being "a good mimic, a long-distance runner, and black." His university persuades him to go, and when he returns, crawling with data and skin disease, he is rewarded with a lowly academic post.

A second trip brings him a Ph.D. degree, and a third a lifetime supply of that scholarly formaldehyde, tenure. Surprisingly, his life as an aborigine (he is accepted as a Dang) makes considerably more sense to him than his hollow existence as an academician. The savages consider him a master prophet, and he is on the point of believing it himself when, like a paddle ball on a rubber cord, he is snapped back to civilization. The irony is delicately put, and Satirist Elliott leaves no doubt as to which society he is shaving with his razor's edge.

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