New Stories from the South: 1991. - book reviews

The South's sense of place has been at least partly based on its alienation from the rest of the country. And, for better or worse, that alienation has been diminishing steadily. Henry Grady may have been wrong a little over a hundred years ago when he declared a "New South." But the South did start a slow move back into American life with Roosevelt, the New Deal, and World War II. Then, in 1976, the nation turned to Jimmy Carter for leadership, a gesture that seemed to indicate that wounds had healed, that America was one again. Now we have a president from Little Rock, a forbidden city that could not have produced a president even 30 years ago. And Clinton took his oath of office with a black poet by his side.

Our writers are reflecting some of the change. Peter Taylor sounded an important note in his 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner, A Summons to Memphis, in which Philip Carver, without too much angst, can escape Tennessee to live well enough with a Jewish girlfriend in a cramped apartment vacant of heirloom furniture, in, of all places, New York City. A Compson could never have done it so easily. I think we might note, too, that Alice Walker, even in that early collection of stories, In Love and Trouble (1973), could focus on the plights of black women with little of the tapestry of slavery. Lee Smith, at the same time, has become one of our best without much concern for racial guilt. A writer like Charlestonian Josephine Humphreys, at work in the heart of the old Confederacy, finds more racial balance than conflict in her remarkable novels. Meanwhile, people like Barry Hannah, Madison Bell, Bobbie Ann Mason, Clyde Edgerton, and Larry Brown have brought Vietnam forward as an important new southern theme, a theme suggesting that a region's sense of loss in a questionable cause now belongs to the nation itself.

There is probably no better place to see what is changing and what is staying the same in southern fiction than in Shannon Ravenel's annual collection, New Stories from the South. Seven volumes are now in print, and, as the editor points out in her introduction to the most recent collection, most of the stories appeared originally in the mainstays of American fiction writers, the so-called "little magazines," which most of us do not see with any regularity. For the 1991 edition, Ravenel says she surveyed 175 American periodicals for her choices; for the 1992 edition she saw 85. Thus she does considerable service to us by bringing forward fine stories that we might not ordinarily see.

Her 1991 edition is perhaps the best in the series. It opens with Peter Taylor's "Cousin Aubrey," a wonderful piece about the sudden disappearance of a family member. In the course of trying to run him down many years later, the narrator encounters an entire family history. It closes with Reynolds Price's elegant prose in His Final Mother."

The 14 stories between these two do not fail us either. I think that Lee Smith's Me and My Baby View the Eclipse (Putnam, 1990) is one of the best recent collections of short stories, and I am glad to see it represented here with "Intensive Care," partly a beauty shop conversation about real love and real death. If Smith's collection was not the best of 1990, Larry Brown's Big Bad Love (Algonquin) was. It was good that Ravenel got the title story for her collection. I also liked Jill McCorkle's "Waiting for Hard Times to End," in which a rambling girl tells her story on postcards to her sister back home. And I enjoyed Bobbie Ann Mason's character Jazz, a slick dealer in French lingerie.

Such other writers as Mark Richard, Nanci Kincaid, Hilding Johnson, Elizabeth Hunnewell, Susan Richards, Thomas Brewer, and Robert Butler help round out very strong company. But I want to call particular attention to Robert Morgan's "Poinsett's Bridge," the skillfully told story of a mountain mason who is robbed of six months' wages, and to Rick Bass's "In the Loyal Mountains," about a young man's passion for a girl named Spanda and his close relationship with his strange uncle Jimy. Morgan and Bass are certainly among our best story tellers.

Of the 17 writers represented in the 1992 edition of New Stories, six appeared in the 1991 edition. One might encourage Ravenel to pursue a little more variety, but it is hard to complain about seeing Lee Smith again in the opener, "The Bubba Stories," in which Charlene Christian, "a chunky size twelve," does poorly in her creative writing courses while making up wonderful stories about her nonexistent brother for her friends. And we can hardly complain about more Kincaid, Morgan, Butler, Taylor, and Brown. I was glad to see Padgett Powell again and to discover Abraham Verghese, Mary Ward Brown, and Patricia Lear. James Lee Burke's "Texas City" is an especially good find. Nice editorial additions are the writers' comments on their stories, printed with a photograph and the standard biography at the end of each story.

I do have to question the southern credentials of a few of the writers. We southerners have always been expansive when it comes to giving citizenship to those we like, and over the years we have worked just about everyone except Henry James and Emily Dickinson into our canon. Yet I wonder about Ravenel's inclusion of Reginald McKnight of Pittsburgh, Allison Baker of Oregon, and Susan Perabo of St. Louis. I think the best we can do here is declare these three our honorary cousins many times removed.