BOOK REVIEW : The Winning Stories of Acceptance

The Luxury of Tears: Winning Stories from the National Society of Arts and Letters Competition edited by Susan Greenburg (August House/Little Rock: $15.95; 190 pp.)

With three possible exceptions, the 12 winners of this first annual short story competition all have advanced degrees in literature or creative writing, and those three authors may well have just decided not to mention the fact.

Every one lies in a university town. All were born within a decade of one another, and although the authors represent a broad geographical mix, the preoccupations of the writers are so similar that the reader could easily assume the collection was actually a novel with an inordinately large cast of characters.

“These are our citizens,” Robert Flynn says in his foreword, “and their drive to excel in a nation that rewards success rather than excellence, their energetic examination of values in a nation that is not amused by thought, their uneasy acceptance of the rights and guilts of citizenship will serve us all.”

And, I’ll add, will depress us, because uneasy as that acceptance may be, it still demonstrates capitulation, no matter how reluctant and how grudging. Adroit and technically skillful, these stories make a mournful dozen. You look in vain for antic humor, for formal innovation, for invention and risk.

The winning authors have settled, have come to terms with things as they are. To Flynn, that seems to demonstrate maturity, but maturity may be an overrated virtue, especially where writers are concerned.

“Theirs is not the empty idealism of untried youth, but the courageous acceptance of outrageous fortune, the intolerance of injustice, and the honest if painful acceptance that not every problem has a solution, and of those that do, many cannot be solved in four thousand words or less.”

There’s that word--acceptance--again, twice; giving the collection an artificial theme, making the work of 12 different people sound like the novel it isn’t; supplying an overarching unity that shouldn’t really be there at all.

“None of the stories focuses on private matters and temporary concerns,” Flynn adds, “but on those things that concern all of us, matters of the heart and mind, human values, family, traditions, young and old age, and of the fear and failure that diminishes but cannot dim hope.”

A distinctive voice here belongs to Linda Miller, whose story “Watching for Coyotes” is set on a chicken farm.

“Corey lived with chickens” is an arresting beginning, especially if you’ve been hearing about aging parents, failing relationships and overqualified people working at dead-end jobs for the previous 120 pages. After a while, those characters, no matter how well delineated, articulate and sensitive, begin to blur, but Corey sticks in the mind.

Corey mucks out the chicken houses in her father’s old boots, jeans, shirt and coat. When she finally goes out on a date, bits of feathers and shell are stuck to her only good dress, and she must be home by 9 to tend her ailing father and look in on the baby chicks, incinerating any that might have met with misadventure while she was out with Lance.

“Ash,” by Margaret Peterson Haddix, is equally memorable. The narrator is in her hospital bed, covered with gauze from head to toe, the victim of a gas explosion in a friend’s apartment. Opening with Lori’s recurrent nightmare of the fire, the story then confronts her mental and physical agony as well as the guilty relief felt by the friend who escaped intact, merely by going out for doughnuts while Lori stayed home to start coffee. By the end of these 12 pages, the reader will be smelling smoke and imagining the sheets are aflame.

Two fine stories--”Skim Milk,” by Ellen Kanner, and “The Dragon Lady and the Ponytail Plant,” by Laura Leigh Hancock--deal with the profound cultural differences between Occident and Orient, and what happens when American women attempt to leap the chasm.

Set in Tokyo, “Skim Milk” examines the fragile friendship between a lonely young American and her Japanese language teacher, while “Dragon Lady” puts an American into a Chinese restaurant as a waitress, a superb vantage point for enlarging her understanding of the mysterious East.

These four tales linger tenaciously in the mind, perhaps because they deal not with universals, but with more private matters.