Friday, June 25, 1999 | 10:02 a.m.
Scott Dickensheets' books/magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at 259-4022 or [email protected].
You can tell at a glance that it's Esquire's "summer reading issue": There, nestled by cover model Esther Canadas' barely concealed left breast, pretty small but unmistakable ... by gosh, it's a book! Every year, Esquire's image of a book-toting lovely is a sure sign that summer is here. So grab your sunscreen, skimpy suit, fluffy towel and collection of intellectually knotty short stories and hit the beach!
I've never been sure of the connection between hot weather and short fiction, but the July Esquire isn't the only magazine to feel it. The June 21-28 New Yorker is a double-issue summer fiction special, playing -- yeah, yeah -- on the millennial theme: "20 Writers for the 21st Century."
Esquire's trophy writer this year is Raymond Carver, dead since 1988. As recent books by Ernest Hemingway and Ralph Ellison prove, that's no detriment to publishing success. But Carver's Esquire piece, the newly discovered short story "Kindling," is no posthumous patch job. It's a "complete, fully realized" story, enthuses Esquire Editor David Granger, written when "Carver was at the height of his powers."
Carver at the height of his powers was the big daddy of American short fiction, influencing a generation of writers with stripped-down, unadorned tales that were invariably praised to the skies as "spare" and "evocative." What we're talking about when we're talking about spare and evocative: Nothing much happens.
In "Kindling," a recovering alkie takes a room with an old couple in a faraway city; the three trade awkward conversation the first night; he keeps to himself afterward. Later, he chops some wood for the landlords, then moves out, the end.
But what at first seems like a story about a guy who moves in with an old couple and chops some wood is revealed, as the character jots enigmatic entries into a notebook ("Nothing"), to actually be a story about a guy who moves in with an old couple, chops some wood and jots enigmatic entries into a notebook. In other words, even Raymond Carver at the height of his powers could write a dull story.
In fairness, maybe it's just me. I've never liked stories where all the action is coded in apparent inaction, stories you have to read like photo negatives. If everything happens between the lines, what's the point of lines? Therein lies the Achilles heel of short fiction -- denied the full immersion of the novel, or the octane kick that essays and literary journalism get from being true, short stories have to take care of business in quick strokes and literary trickery, gimmicky setups and portentous effects.
Luckily, Esquire's other stories -- by Russell Banks, Richard Powers and Arthur Bradford -- utilize those elements more deftly. Which is to say, things happen.
While Powers' contribution, for instance, is really about memory and literature, it alternately takes place in a Beirut room where Moslem captors hold an American hostage, and in the prisoner's unhinging mind, where memories of his girlfriend and his favorite books swirl together. Things happen.
Things happen in Braford's "Dogs," too, but no combination of words I know is up to describing what this insane story is really about. Believe me, I've tried: surreal, profane, dada, grotesque, freaking weird, man ...
Think a plot summary will help? Think again: Guy has sex with girlfriend's dog; dog has puppies and one very small human baby; guy floats baby down river; years later guy is visited by singing muskrat, which turns out to be baby (now a small man) in fur outfit; guy's dog kills small man; guy finds small man's girlfriend in iron lung; she's been impregnated by small man; zealots believe hers to be immaculate conception (the little man was, wink, wink, very little); to consternation of zealots, she births litter of puppies; they grow up to be famous singing-dog act; improbably, everyone lives happily ever after.
Like so much postmodern comic fiction, "Dogs" delivers its wild inventiveness in the drollest language. A sample of its sparking dialogue: "Let's stay here," said Gina. "All right," I said. Needless to say, it's monstrously entertaining.
Over at the New Yorker, it's clear the venerable weekly hasn't completely bled its lines of queen bee Tina Brown -- this "20 Writers for the 21st Century" business is pure Tina, buzzy and talky, begging to be argued about in public. Fortunately, the stories largely survive the hype overload and, befitting the magazine's cosmopolitanism, are admirably multicultural.
There's even a boarder tale here, too, although no wood chopping I could find. Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent" is the story about a Calcutta boy in Boston, his 103-year-old landlord, his arranged marriage and his assimilation. While it's language is simple and unornamented, it isn't "spare" and "evocative" in the portentous, quote-marky way of Carver's work. Instead of stylized atmosphere, it has story, a convincing look at people whose lives are both like and not like our own. Things happen.
At the other end of the stylistic scale is Donald Antrim's word-stuffed and voluble "An Actor Prepares," an antic and vibrant story about a small college's avant garde production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
I was eager to read Sherman Alexie's "The Toughest Indian in the World"; an Indian, Alexie comes with a strong rep as a novelist, poet and screenwriter -- a multiculti Renaissance man. And he does have a firm prose style, particularly enviable when you have a spongecake style like mine. Alas, the story -- about an Indian journalist liberated into his native essence when he allows the title character to sodomize him in a motel room -- sounds like an idea Norman Mailer might have flirted with and discarded during his crazy pot phase.
There's a bushel of other worthy writers in the New Yorker (pretty much the whole issue is dedicated to short fiction) including Junot Diaz, Nathan Englander, A.M. Homes, Michael Chabon and the irritatingly ubiquitous David Foster Wallace. I still haven't figured out what all this has to do with summer -- when I go to the beach, I keep my eyes peeled for barely dressed supermodels -- but no matter. It's an amazing bonanza of reading for $3.95.
Reading list
* "Crime Wave," by James Ellroy (Vintage, $12): Although the celebrated crime novelist turns his intense gaze to nonfiction in this essay collection (which does include three short stories), he in fact is pursuing a quasi-fictional agenda.
In pieces such as "Glamour Jungle," about the 1963 murder of an aspiring Hollywood starlet, Ellroy's goal isn't to tell the story, which is slight. No, he aims to use his hyper-stylized language -- an amalgam of cop-shop lingo and tough hipster slang, rendered in rabbit-punch sentences -- to create nonfiction as densely atmospheric as his novels.
To a surprising degree, he succeeds. "Glamour Jungle" is one good example among several. As Ellroy piles on the detail (he loves police procedure) and peels back the layers of conflicting testimony, limning the starlet's pathetic history of dope and obsessive dieting, the story becomes nonfiction noir at its best. It's hard, it's boiled, it's utterly compelling.
Of course, when Ellroy wanders away from the boulevard of broken dreams -- as when he writes about a reunion of junior high classmates -- his style proves too brutal for the material, but that happens rarely enough in this book.
* Outside, July 1999: The wreck of the fabled Andrea Doria, hunkered 240 feet down off the coast of Nantucket, has become a magnet for deep divers. Fatally so, in many cases: Three divers died there last summer, Outside reports in a too-brief but eye-opening dispatch. That figure may climb as the number of amateurs combing the wreck for treasures increases yearly.
Several factors make the wreck lethal, including cold, unpredictable currents and tangles of discarded commercial fishing nets that drape the wreckage. Treasure-fever ensures that divers will continue to brave the hulk until it's stripped bare. But, as one diver says, "The most important artifact you'll ever bring home is yourself."
Footnotes
* Whoops! Why do bad mistakes happen to good Shelf Life columnists? Somehow -- if only I drank to excess, I'd have an excuse! -- I mixed up departed editors of Outside: Departed editor Mark Bryan is not, as reported in a previous column, the boss at National Geographic Adventure magazine. Departed editor John Rasmus is. What can I say -- things happen.
* Bill lives! Onetime Las Vegan Bill Moody, author of the jazz-oriented Evan Horne mystery series, will return triumphantly at 7 p.m. July 13 to sign copies of his latest mystery, "Bird Lives!," at Borders on Sahara and Decatur.
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