All Anthologies

New additions to the short-story short list

by Patrick Rapa

Unaccustomed Earth

For the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's second collection, love is either the 400-pound gorilla in the room or the imaginary friend; everybody's bending over backward to not deal with it or admit they believe in it. It takes one couple a lifetime together to agree their arranged marriage might've stumbled onto something worthwhile after all. Another couple at a destination wedding, left to their own devices for the first time since their kids were born, only dissolve their unspoken tension in the final moments of their vacation. It's a relief, yes, when Lahiri's creations — often the sons and daughters of Bengali immigrants trying to reconcile two immutable cultures — finally make peace with their situations, but sometimes the pace is so slow, the details so intricately reported on, you wonder if Lahiri's building up to something. She is.

Knockemstiff

Knowing that these stories of depravity, murder and abuse are inspired by the real-life town (Knockemstiff, Ohio) where Donald Ray Pollock grew up might add a sick note of seriousness to what you might otherwise enjoy as a wild, trashy ride through a made-up American hellhole. Nah, why should you let that ruin the fun? Even when things are intensely twisted or pathetic, there's always the potential for Pollock to take things even further, to My Name Is Earl-ish red-state ridiculousness, and then you can stop thinking of these characters as real people. And so it's a kind of parody hidden beneath smart sentences and powerful images. Relax. It's fiction. Most likely.

Dangerous Laughter

A deadpan play-by-play of a house cat's relentless pursuit of a rodent, Steven Millhauser's "Cat 'N' Mouse" is a marvelous reinvention of a classic cartoon conceit (think Tom and Jerry/Itchy & Scratchy). In between each comic mishap — be it a wayward hammer, an exploding cigar or a wildly swinging wrecking ball — is a moment to examine the characters' roles in their tragically symbiotic mobius strip. And why shouldn't these things be contemplated? We're talking about creatures capable of creating wind-up robotic females to seduce their enemy — surely they're capable of complicated philosophical ponderings. "The mouse understands that the clownishly inept cat has the freedom to fail over and over again, during the long course of an inglorious lifetime, while he himself is denied the liberty of a single mistake." It would be tempting to seek a larger metaphor at work here, for the War on Terror or something, but that's not Millhauser's game, as this fantastically inventive collection drives that point home: There's no overarching moral agenda. Sometimes a mouse hole is just a mouse hole.

Now in paperback, Zhu Wen's I Love Dollars (Penguin, 256 pp., $14) is a strange mix of neuroses and extroversion set in the least ancient parts of China. These six lengthy stories are populated by half-sketchy rarely-do-wells as driven by sex, money and alcohol as they are by a curious sense of familial duty. Best in small doses, like Altoids.

Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (Knopf, 400 pp., $26.95) is mostly a greatest-hits comp. If the nine previously unreleased tracks tell us anything, it's that Wolff still knows how to write warmly and astutely about unique human interactions.

Kevin Brockmeier's The View From the Seventh Layer (Pantheon, 288 pp., $21.95) is a marvelous and obfuscating book of fables. Well, he calls them fables, but there are no clear lessons here, just gentle moments of insanity and wonder. In one, a man buys God's overcoat at a thrift store and finds its pockets always full of prayers. In another, a mute living in a musical-minded city raises so many parakeets, he has to start giving them away as gifts. What does it all mean? Does it have to mean something? Yes? OK, try this: It's a weirder world than you think.

(pat@citypaper.net)