In R.K. Narayan's novel The Vendor of Sweets, a young entrepreneur pushes his father to invest in what seems like a dubious venture: a short-story machine. How the machine works exactly is never made clear, and the hapless man squanders the family savings...

This is but fancy; however, I was reminded of Narayan's machine recently while reading the Best New American Voices 2006, an anthology edited by Jane Smiley. The book gives such a desultory vision of the future of American letters that one can only hope its title is wrong. Without ignoring the occasional flashes of verve, the stories included are so monotonous that they seem to have been written by a single person of middling talent. All but one of them are written in the first person; a similar percentage hinge upon the narrator's difficulties with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family, or with ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity. The plot and action are always negligible: one story takes place on a road trip to a presidential birthplace, another while moving apartments, another at a wedding, another while opening presents in front of the Christmas tree. None of this much matters anyway, because the things the characters do are always mundane and largely incidental to their psychological conflicts. From time to time a structural innovation appears to offer an interesting novelty, but under the packaging the same old formula is always to be found.

Even the style of writing displays a numbing verisimilitude. The first-person voice is always a lazily generalized vernacular, jazzed up at significant moments with consciously poetic frills in the exposition.

Finally, most of these stories end with a symbolic "moment of clarity" in which nothing happens, but a change has been imperceptibly arrived at. The apogee of immobility at the end of Jamie Keene's "Alice's House" should suffice to make the point: "It's a little after midnight when the phone rings again. It seems as if it's ringing forever, but finally it stops, abruptly and absolutely. And it's quiet again, and I'm alone."

It should be no surprise that every one of the writers in this anthology have one more thing in common: They have attended writers' workshops, either in graduate programs or in similarly organized writing conferences.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 7:04 PM  |