Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511270015
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: G-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THE O. HENRY AWARDS: PRIZE STORIES 1995. Edited by William Abrahams. Doubleday. $25.
Each of these well-known annuals recognizes an anniversary this year: "New Stories From the South" its 10th, and "The O. Henry Awards" its 75th. The former includes 17 stories from 14 magazines (all except GQ and The Atlantic Monthly are "little" magazines), and the latter, 22 stories from 15 magazines (none of them "Southern" and few of them "little" in any sense of the words).
Only one story appears in both collections: Ellen Gilchrist's "The Stucco House," originally published in The Atlantic Monthly.
This, in part, is the point of Shannon Ravenel's introduction to her collection. "Conventional commercial wisdom does not see literary short fiction as a market draw any more," she writes. "Literary periodicals, on the other hand, exist to publish the best contemporary fiction ... Advertisers are secondary, tertiary, and even nonexistent in their considerations."
She continues, "to put it bluntly, even though the best creative writing in America is to be found in the pages of these tiny periodicals, the only way to keep them alive is through subsidy infusions, private and public ... Consider what we put at stake if we do not act to support the National Endowment for the Arts ..."
Editor Abrahams is not so politically forthcoming in his introduction, but he does write, of the stories he's chosen, that "If I were to generalize about them ... I would say that they are remarkably free of deference to dogmatic programs, but each pursues its own vision of what the story should be." An implicit argument, at least, for the necessity of art free from the entanglement of purse-strings or P.C. precepts.
All of which leads to this assessment of the two volumes' contents: they are remarkably diverse, and remarkably different in tone from one another.
Personally, I find Ravenel's collection more congenial. But then, I'm a Southerner and these stories celebrate people like those I know, living lives like those with which I'm familiar: rednecks who try to do right, summer camp, kids' baseball games, racism, foster children, Elvis and ladies who still serve aspic on china plates. Redemption, forgiveness and love run through nearly all of these stories.
The stories in Abrahams' collection are, on the other hand, generally a good deal more cynical. They deal with abandonment, selfishness, the dissolution of relationships, and seductions. They are well-crafted, but not, on the whole, pleasing.
Of course, "pleasing" is in the eye of the beholder. Finally, the strength of each collection is its own strong identity; and the strength of the two collections together is their wide-ranging, wonderful variety.
Monty S. Leitch is a columnist for this newspaper.
by CNB