Every word counts

Four short fiction selections highlight the best of the genre

REVIEWS BY IAN SCHWARTZ

Readers demand a lot from a short story. It must entertain, foster deep thoughts and be darned well written. In other words, a good short story must mirror a great novel shrunk to its essence—leaving only a sleek form in which every word counts.

Each story in the collections reviewed here atones for its slight physical stature with steroidal literary musculature. The stories are original, imaginative, wise, and so crammed with life you'll want to breathe them in deeply. They are the genre at its finest.

East Asian elegies

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the Indonesian author of All That is Gone, makes each word resonate with meaning. Translated by Willem Samuels, Toer's eight semi-autobiographical tales are teeming with cruelty and beauty. A winner of the PEN Freedom-to-Write Award, Toer spent years as a political prisoner in his homeland in the 1960s and '70s. Those years come through in his writing, a mix of longing and desperation that possess the stark, bleak beauty of a full moon or a trackless desert.

The stories, which take place in the author's rural East Java hometown of Blora, begin with the haunting title story, in which a man looks back at his lost youth and innocence, captive to cobwebbed memories. That helplessness is mirrored throughout Toer's collection, most notably by the citizens of Blora, who in the mid-20th century are under the thumb of various warring factions and conquerors whose hegemony extends to their thoughts and beliefs. In "Acceptance," the book's longest story, we watch as war causes the disintegration of a large family. Other tales are equally as grim—child abuse, torture, political and physical domination are just some of Toer's themes. Yet his skill is such that humanity is present in each tale, lurking in the shadows.


The mean streets of Baton Rouge

It doesn't take more than a few minutes of reading Laurie Lynn Drummond's debut collection, Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You to realize that this nomadic ex-cop can flat-out write. With spartan prose exposing a visceral power, Drummond has crafted the fictionalized tales of five Baton Rouge policewomen, based on her experiences as a uniformed officer in that same city.

Bringing to life the mind-numbing boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror that categorize police work, Drummond's stories burrow into your guts and carve out a place for themselves. These women and their strengths, weaknesses and emotions come across as an amalgam of one cop, one woman. The same one who in "Absolutes" can shoot a man, then shove her hand into his chest to keep him alive, could also be the cop who viciously slaps her young daughter for chattering too much in "Cleaning Your Gun."

With Joseph Wambaugh's ear for cop dialogue and a mystic earthiness all her own, Drummond makes her characters come to life, and at the end leaves us with an idea of what they're searching for: a glimmer of decency and a bit of hope at the end of the day.


An immigrant's coming of age

From Drummond's Southern-fried tales, we move on to the borscht belt with David Bezmozgis' Natasha: and Other Stories. These seven stories about growing up a poor Russian Jewish immigrant in Toronto are so Russian in tone they should be read with a glass of tea at hand and a cube of sugar between one's teeth. Yet they are so Western in theme that even if you've never set foot outside your hometown, they'll make your heart ache.

Newly arrived émigré Mark Berman is a first-grader in "Tapka," Bezmozgis' opening story about the boundaries of trust and the inherent stupidity in leaving a beloved pet with a seven-year-old. By "Minyan," the finale of this short collection, Mark is a young man, idealistic but a little wiser.

The 30-year-old Bezmozgis writes with a depth of grace and wry understanding not usually discovered before middle life. His stories are a potent mixture of the compassionate and the obscene. That combination is most apparent in the collection's title story, "Natasha," in which the 16-year-old Mark has to explore his feelings for teenaged Natasha, his cousin by marriage and a whore by circumstance. She casually leads Mark into a world of fantasy that inevitably comes crashing down, forcing a return to a reality of adult choices.

Though this collection is small, each story packs a devastating wallop as it describes what it means to be a foreigner, an outsider and a Jew in a land where even after half a lifetime, you're never really sure you know the rules.


Jungle book

It's hard not to like Hannah Tinti even before you read Animal Crackers. She's the lone editor—and half of a two-woman crew—at the avant-garde literary magazine One Story, which consists of one story per issue. While anyone who can persist at such a labor of love and still manage to put Ramen noodles on the table deserves admiration, Tinti also somehow found time to pen a stunningly original collection of stories on the human condition. You could also call it a look at the zoological condition, as each story features an animal. Depending on the story, the beast may be an animal doppelganger of a human character, represent his or her better self or darkest fears, or bear the brunt of a human character's misery.

In these stories, Tinti walks lonely paths of pain as if she owned a trail map. They are written boldly, without a misstep or false note—whether she's writing about anthropomorphic zoo giraffes on strike in "Reasonable Terms" or an untamable and unbreakable woman in "Miss Waldron's Red Colobus." The result is a prodigious debut full of dark humor, style and compassion that sets the bar extraordinarily high for Tinti in the future.


Ian Schwartz writes from New York City.

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