Home             Reviews             Essays              Fiction              Poetry             Guidelines              About               Links

The 2006 Best American Short Stories
Jordan Hartt

War—or to be more precise, the distant specter of war—haunts the stories contained in the 2006 Best American Short Stories anthology, selected by Ann Patchett. And to this reader, the collection is notable not for its own rather pedestrian literary merits, but for what the stories collectively say about the American century, and how we come to terms with it.

When you pick up the orange-covered 2006 BASS—when will these anthologies splurge for more interesting covers: the collection since its inception in 1915 has looked as though some of the best creative work being done in North America simply gets photocopied and stapled by graduate students—do what I didn’t do: skip the introduction.

Well, read Katrina Kenison’s introduction, only because there is a nice moment where a friend shows up at the secluded Kenison cottage with the Hemingway story “Big Two-Hearted River” and reads it to the family. It’s a quiet essay on the joys of reading. Disrupted by the chaotic desperation of Ann Patchett’s introduction.

Patchett is a fine, if tepid, novelist, but in eight excrutiating pages of introduction she mentions the actual stories in the collection only once, and then in the very last paragraph: Paul Yoon’s opening story, and why she chose it to lead off the collection. (Because the order of the stories in the collection appear in reverse alphabetical order!) Before that she complains, 1 about the lack of readership for the short story in general, 2 ruminates on how she first started to read short stories, and, 3 ruminates on how she got started as a young writer. Reading her introduction is like getting stuck listening to a maiden aunt at a family reunion—trapped under a parasol and the sticky scent of too-strong perfume—when what you really want to do is swim in the lake.

Usually I enjoy the introductions. They set up the stories that are included, and discuss the selection process. But this year, I turned to the first story, Yoon’s “Once the Shore,” first published in One Story, almost in relief.

There are very real gems in this collection, but they are few and far between. Donna Tartt’s “The Ambush,” “So Much for Artemis,” by Patrick Ryan, “Refresh, Refresh,” by Benjamin Percy, “Cowboy,” by Thomas McGuane, and “The Casual Car Pool,” by Katherine Bell, were the highlights of the collection for this reader.

Tartt’s “The Ambush,” brings us back to the era of childhood, remembered perfectly, as the protagonist plays with a neighborhood child who is obsessed with the death of his father in Vietnam. Like Charles Baxter, like Charles Schulz, Tartt knows the terrain of childhood well. And the end of the story becomes a commentary on adult life, seens through the lens of the children.

“So Much for Artemis” is a complex, multilayered story in which this reader counted no fewer than seven major characters, with their own crises, conflicts, and resolutions, all seen through the limited third-person point of view of another child protagonist. Despite a near Highlights for Children moment near the end, the story is one of those that makes you feel, for a moment, that you are floating in another, perfectly drawn, world.

“Refresh, Refresh,” tackles the Iraq war head on, exploring its effect on those on the homefront. The fathers of two boys are deployed overseas. Fatherless, the boys fight bullies, go hunting, encounter a sleazy recruiting officer. The story hangs together somewhat awkwardly, but the sharpness and crispness of Percy’s prose provide the true pleasures of the story.

“Cowboy,” by Thomas McGuane, may be one of the most honest stories of the collection. A cowboy works for an old woman and an “old sumbitch” for decades, only to discover, at the end, that he himself has become an old sumbitch himself. Dust, the smell of cattle, the taste of sugary pie, and the sense of a dull ache of loneliness hung with this reader long after the final word had been read.
“ The Casual Car Pool,” by Katherine Bell, is one of the true joys of this collection. A basejumper gets caught up in the Golden Gate Bridge, slowing the morning rush hour commute. Bell bounces back and forth from character to character slowly, exploring their lives, and weaving them all together into a beautiful, stable, whole.

There were a host of disappointing pieces. Alice Munro’s “A View from Castle Rock” and Bob Coover’s “Grandmother’s Nose”—two mediocre stories by two great talents—being notable examples. Patchett seemed drawn to stories that dealt with war and/or Asia, in whatever form that took, and served to reinforce the idea that the “Best American” stories every year are rarely anything more than reflections of a particular editor’s tastes.

Any of the 120 stories chosen by Katrina Kenison are just as good, perhaps better than, the ones finally selected. Flipping through the back, I was surprised at how many stories I actually preferred to Patchett’s selections. At a certain level, there is no “best;” only “preferred.”

So what, if anything, does the 2006 collection “mean” for American literature? First, that American writers, as a group, are slowly coming around to “the war,” as its known, and are becoming braver, and more willing to talk about it. The cowardice and fear of being political that has marked American fiction since, perhaps, the mid-nineteen-sixties may be beginning to crumble.

And, finally, the collection serves as a reminder of the outstanding talent at work today. With 120 strong stories culled out of the thousands of stories being published every year, I struggle to think of another time in which this many good writers were publishing this many good stories.

purchase The 2006 Best American Short Stories from Amazon.com