Accomplished authors keep it brief

REVIEWS BY LACEY GALBRAITH

Short stories are the often overlooked gems of good fiction. Unlike the novel, there is little room for error. In such a short form, there can be no poor storytelling, no long-windedness or lapses in plot. A writer must catch his or her audience quick, with the pacing strong and the characters vivid. Charles Johnson and John Edgar Wideman have proven themselves to be writers of distinction, their books praised by critics and readers alike. In their new works they take on the challenges of writing in the short story form and come up with collections that differ both in style and agenda.

Fables for our times

A MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of both an NEA grant and a Guggenheim fellowship, and the author of more than 10 works of fiction and nonfiction, Charles Johnson is more than a little prolific. His novel, Middle Passage, won the 1990 National Book Award while his latest short story collection, Dr. King's Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories is sure to crack apart any notion that today's fiction could ever grow stale.

In this collection, stories are vehicles for conveying philosophical conundrums or questions of self. Moving across cultures and through centuries, Johnson creates worlds where a man's dreams are taxed and Dr. Martin Luther King has a revelation while perusing the contents of his refrigerator one long night. Historical figures such as Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes and the aforementioned Dr. King make appearances, and in one of the best stories, "Executive Decision," Johnson addresses the issue of affirmative action with grace and insight, accomplishing more through his characterization than any lawmaker ever could.

Though the issues and ideas that concern many of these stories are heavy, the prose never is. In "The Gift of the Osuo" Johnson describes an elderly African sorcerer as "brittle and serious in his leather cap and robe . . . bald as a stone, having around his head a few puffballs of gray hair like pothers of smoke." In the title story the reader watches as Dr. King "picked up a Golden Delicious apple, took a bite from it, and instantly prehended the haze of heat from summers past, the roots of the tree from which the fruit had been taken, the cycles of sun and rain and seasons, the earth, and even those who tended the orchard."

Johnson's prose is solid yet playful, restrained yet vivid. His characters are more than colorful and he never falls prey to taking himself too seriously. In essence, these stories are modern fables, tales that, with unsettling subtlety, linger with you long after the book has been put down.


Lyrical prose, musical style

Just as celebrated a writer is John Edgar Wideman, who with the publication of his latest collection God's Gym shows why he is the first author ever to win the PEN/Faulkner Award twice (for 1984's Sent for You Yesterday and 1990's Philadelphia Fire). Nominated for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for nonfiction, his stories have appeared in numerous national publications including Harper's, GQ, Esquire and even The Best American Short Stories.

Almost like jazz, there is a rhythm to Wideman's prose. His sentences are long and dense, but have a snap to them, a staccato that is musical. In "The Silence of Thelonious Monk" there's such a sense of urgency, a rush to the writing that it is hard not to fall all over yourself in the process of reading. In imagining the dramatic ending of the love affair between the two poets Verlaine and Rimbaud, he writes, "love offered, tasted, spit out, two people shocked speechless, lurching away like drunks, like sleepwalkers, from the mess they'd made. Monk's music just below my threshold of awareness, scoring the movie I was imagining, a soundtrack inseparable from what the actors were feeling, from what I felt watching them pantomime their melodrama."

Wideman is a writer who knows how to grab you by the heart. His characters do not shy away from the sometimes harsh explorations of love, race, self, but face them with such electricity, such pointed emotion, that the reader becomes better for the experience. Wideman's writing challenges you, shows you both beauty and despair. It is an engaging challenge though, one you can't help but returning to again and again.


Lacey Galbraith is a writer in Nashville.

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