THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 9, 1996 TAG: 9606100189
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE PATON
LENGTH: 81 lines
BEST OF THE SOUTH
From 10 Years of New Stories From the South
EDITED BY SHANNON RAVENEL
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY ANNE TYLER
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 423 pp. $15.95.
Anne Tyler, who selected 20 stories for this volume from 10 years of the annual New Stories from the South series, closes her introduction to this cream-of-the-crop anthology with a plea for the tradition of Southern fiction to continue.
``Don't go! Don't change! Don't slip away completely!,'' she implores.
Which is not to say that the voices and images here aren't as distinctively Dixie as the country folk of Flannery O'Connor or the deep woods of William Faulkner.
Indeed, writers Rick Bass and Barry Hannah create bayou fishing camps that feel as authentic as any in Faulkner's 1942 novel of stories, Go Down, Moses!
And Bob Shacochis' ``Where Pelham Fell,'' a tale of an old man's search for a sense of himself through a dig into antebellum days, is akin to O'Connor's story ``A Late Encounter With the Enemy.''
But this collection, for all its excellence, just doesn't feel half as important as those older works. If it is a reaffirmation, Best of the South is at least as much a repackaging.
The book shows that the number of good writers based in the South is almost certainly greater than ever. But their craft hits home now on a singular and personal level, somehow missing the sweep and universality previously achieved.
That is less a reflection of the writers than it is of history.
Where Americans bugled after World War II that the nation had never lost a war, Faulkner let it be remembered that the South certainly had lost one. Then Korea and Vietnam showed everyone the limits of U.S. might.
And to a society that expected an ever bigger and better future, O'Connor's ``Everything That Rises Must Converge'' delivered a jolt when its typewriter-selling hero Julian glumly admitted that he would never amount to anything.
Now, anyone under 35 can see that a downsized future of footing the baby boomers' Social Security checks and paying off the national deficit probably won't be so rosy.
The choice of Tyler to select the stories is an odd one. Why not Shannon Ravenel, a definite Southerner, the editor of New Stories From the South since its 1986 inception and also the longtime editor of The Best American Short Stories series?
One could argue that Tyler, born in Minnesota, raised in Raleigh, N.C., and come of age in Baltimore, is too distanced. She is a fine judge of talent, but her choices don't do that much to place the South at the center of modern American writing.
Tyler even tells us: ``Not once did I base a decision on how `Southern' the writing was.'' After she had made her choices, though, she let them stand against the simple question: Could this story have come from the South and nowhere else? By her calculation, the answer is yes for just eight of the 20 stories.
One selection that passes Tyler's nowhere-else test is Bass' ``The Watch,'' though it bears mention that this great American writer, one who matters, has set his stories everywhere from Montana to Michigan to Mississippi. His tale here of a country-store owner who hunts his father after he flees their home into the bayous rings with the sorrow of passing time and lost joys.
Hannah uses the short story as fiercely and abruptly as anyone ever has - he stands with Ambrose Bierce, O'Connor, Julio Cortazar. His stories belong to his own surreal world, not to the South or anywhere else. His ``Nicodmeus Bluff'' is a harrowing vision of a boy's descent into the social and racial evils of a Mississippi River town, as his drunken father takes him to a fishing camp and gambles away what turns out to be his life.
There is less visceral stuff - Tony Earley's New South look at ``Charlotte,'' the talky Appalachian rhythms of Lee Smith's ``Intensive Care,'' the sweet growing-up tale that opens the volume, Leon V. Driskell's ``Martha Jean.'' Every story is well-written. Most do what a short story must: quickly plunge the reader into its world.
Still, in the end Best of the South doesn't come together into a volume that must be had. It doesn't succeed in making a literary event of itself. Sure, there's fine story writing coming from the South. But we already knew that. MEMO: Dave Paton is a staff editor. by CNB