While I realize I’m coming down off a McCarthy and Parker high, and I knew that withdrawal would be hard, I’m really missing the jolt of a well turned phrase.
This issue has major contest winners, and some pretty credentialed writers, including an editor of a major literary journal. Of the stories I have read so far, one is about a divorced father and his trying to redeem himself in the eyes of his two kids over a four-day visit, one is about two brothers, their dead grandfather, and bitterness over family script, one is about an ex-drunk and his looking back over his marital problems and saving the man who was sleeping with his ex-wife, one is rather strange about a man’s feelings for a lake and his parents abandonment of him, one is about a fat man who decides to commit suicide by fasting but his plans are foiled when he dies in an automobile accident. Each of these five stories has the same premise, that of the story being dependent upon past baggage (brought up in flashback) to explain the current situation of story. The one I’m reading now is very near Push The Bully in context, a blonde boy brought into an environment of a game among the poorer servant’s boys of India, and while I cannot really say much else about the story yet, I admit I peeked to the end and it clearly states that the character has accomplished the required change. I mean, clearly states the fact.
But something else is missing. A lot is missing. There are no awe-inspiring techniques, nothing that moves the needle on my WOW meter. They are well enough written (look who’s talking!) and I wonder if I perhaps have become spoiled.
About a week or two ago, The Cusp of Something blogged about the 2004 Best American Short Stories anthology and I saved the link without reading the post because I wanted to judge for myself by reading this issue (it’s on the hearth, about midway in the lineup). I think that I will pull it out and read it immediately following this issue of Glimmertrain, note down my impressions, and do some comparison thinking.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology