A Disparate Decade

By R.Z. Sheppard

PRIZE STORIES OF THE SEVENTIES: FROM THE O. HENRY AWARDS

Selected by William Abrahams; Doubleday; 404 pages; $12.95

If the novel is, as Randall Jarrell suggested, a long narrative that has something wrong with it, the short story of the past decade might be said to suffer from a tendency toward perfection. Talented writers keep popping up in the few magazines that still publish fiction. The technical level is high; yet the values that make a good story--compression, subtle tone and a microsurgical eye--strike many readers as too precious and inhospitable. One can inhabit a rambling, modern novel; the short story of the '70s seems like an impersonal waiting room full of disparate patients.

Waiting for what? Frequently for something bad to happen, or for a feeling, perception or mood to catch up with something bad that has happened. The stagnant '70s had their share of grim talebearers, notably Joyce Carol Oates, who attracted an unusually wide audience for a short-story writer. Reading the bulk of her work is like taking an unblinking look through the files of a psychiatric social worker. The Dead, her contribution to Prize Stories of the Seventies, follows a neurasthenic woman writer named Ilena through a declining marriage, a feverish love affair and literary success. The first line, taken off a pillbox, sets the tone: "Useful in acute and chronic depression, where accompanied by anxiety, insomnia, agitation; psychoneurotic states manifested by tension, apprehension, fatigue." The story has the quality of an intense case study with cultural footnotes. Some are ironic: "Newly divorced, she had felt virginal again, years younger, truly childlike and American. Beginning again. Always beginning." Some are histrionic: "This is how a woman becomes prehistoric, she thought. Prehistoric. Before all personalized, civilized history. Men make love to her and she is reduced to protoplasm."

Psychic gelatin is the main ingredient of Judith Rascoe's Small Sounds and Tilting Shadows. An aimless American woman uses the London flat of a traveling journalist and begins to feel his presence. She wears his bathrobe, reads his mail and manuscripts, talks cryptically to his friends on the phone. The journalist returns to find he is part of a strange relationship and to make the story's point: "One wants to be something, but what is there to be? Now I wish I were an American, now that's something to be! Without a passport. Yes? Don't you feel it? It's worth traveling for, to become an American."

This theme of serial selves, of second and third acts in American lives, also appears in Mark Helprin's The Schreuderspitze, in which a man leaves his family for what appears to be a Wanderjahr in Europe. He transforms himself into a mountain-climbing machine, conquers an Alp and heads home with what some readers may interpret as a jogger's expensive high.

Only a few stories have direct links to the past decade. Night March, by Tim O'Brien, is a solid bit of realism about a young soldier in Viet Nam from the author's award-winning novel, Going After Cacciato. John Sayles' I-80 Nebraska, M.490--M.205 is a mannered attempt to turn truckers and their CB jargon into folk legend: the headless horseman as Teamster. The most inventive topical piece is Guy Davenport's The Richard Nixon Freischutz Rag, a whimsical satire in which the former President makes small talk in China. Sample:

"That's Marx," he said, pointing.

"Marx," repeated Marshal Yeh.

"And that's Engels."

"Engels."

"And that's Lenin and that's Stalin."

"Precisely," Marshal Yeh replied.

Richard Nixon went back to the second poster, pointing to it with his gloved hand.

"That's Engels?"

"Engels," Marshal Yeh said with a worried, excessively polite look in his eyes.

"We don't see many pictures of Engels in America," Richard Nixon explained.

Stories plainly marked "Made in preoccupied New York" include Leonard Michaels' Robinson Crusoe Liebowitz, a frenetic piece of scatology turning on the inaccessibility of a toilet; Renata Adler's Brownstone, tartly amusing observations from a Manhattan building; and Woody Allen's brilliantly executed The Kugelmass Episode. In search of a love affair, an unhappily married humanities professor from City College hooks up with a magician with the power to transport people into the novel of their choice. Professor Kugelmass chooses Madame Bovary and makes repeated visits to Yonville for trysts with Emma. The miracle has side effects. Notes one scholar after rereading Flaubert's masterpiece: "I cannot get my mind around this. First a strange character named Kugelmass, and now she's gone from the book. Well, I guess the mark of a classic is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something new."

This is true for this collection's best stories. They are by masters of the form, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, John Updike and Saul Bellow, all of whom will undoubtedly be represented when the O. Henry Awards publishes The Prize Stories of the Century.

-- R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"She is beautiful, Kugelmass thought. What a contrast with the troglodyte who shared his bed! He felt a sudden impulse to take this vision into his arms and tell her she was the kind of woman he had dreamed of all his life . . .

'Charles is out for the day,' Emma said, her voice full of playful implication. After the wine, they went for a stroll in the lovely French countryside. 'I've always dreamed that some mysterious stranger would appear and rescue me from the monotony of this crass rural existence,' Emma said, clasping his hand. They passed a small church. 'I love what you have on,' she murmured. 'I've never seen anything like it around here. It's so . . . so modern.'

'It's called a leisure suit,' he said romantically. 'It was marked down.' "

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