New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1996 (New Stories from the South)

Rating:
Summary: Fine Collection of Southern Slices of Life
Review: This review is certainly belated, but the 1996 collection of New Stories from the South is worthy of review nevertheless. The curiosity of the collection is William Faulkner's "Rose of Lebanon", a story written in 1930, but only recently rediscovered and published in The Oxford American, thus "qualifying" it (as if there are judges standing by with little cups for the various stories to pee in?) for inclusion in this year's anthology. Although Kirkus Reviews and Booklist hail the rediscovery, I have to think there must have been a good reason Faulkner himself did not pursue its publication more actively. While the plot and characterisations are admirable, there is a certain awkwardness about how the tale is told. Consider the following sentence, "She looked like something made in an expensive shop, of lace and bright frosting, and turned upside down in the center of a hollow square of troops all young and none of whom had ever heard a bullet; by strange faces which, for all their youth and inexperience and perhaps foreboding, wore none the less of doubt for that." Beautiful writing indeed, but that is supposed to be a line of dialogue. Also: "They all galloped bareheaded with brandished sabres when they had them, but anyway galloping, off the stage altogether, into a lot more rain than a December drizzle; maybe into somewhere else where they could bang themselves to pieces again, like puppets banging themselves to pieces against the painted board-and-plaster, the furious illusions of gardens and woods and dells; maybe to meet brighter faces than Lewis Randolph looking out a carriage window halted in a muddy road." True, the South has a long tradition of storytelling and oratory which Faulkner, via the speaker, is clearly tapping in to; but it all seems a bit much for believable dialogue. I grew up in the South, and although I love run-on sentences more than most, I've never heard anyone talk like that. But this is a minor quibble, and the story is certainly worth a read, as are all the stories in the book. Tim Gautreaux's "Died and Gone to Vegas" taps into the modern tradition of Southern Oratory--lies told over a card table; and while, like many of the stories, it is afflicted with a touch of the stereotypical view of Southerners as trailor trash, is nonetheless equally amusing and touching. My favorite story is "Jealous Husband Returns in the Form of a Parrot" by Robert Olen Butler. Inspired by a tabloid headline, what seems to be an absurd idea actually takes on poignancy and becomes a surreal study of regret. Susan Perabo's "Some Say the World", Annette Sanford's "Goose Girl", and Lee Smith's "The Happy Memories Club" all portray female protagonists at odds with the world and making their place in it as best they can. Ellen Douglas's "Grant" rings with the truth of lost chances, when the narrator's husband's uncle, dying of cancer, moves in with them to live out his remaining days.

Most problematic was Tom Paine's "General Markman's Last Stand", which Kirkus Reviews pans as "simply unconvincing." There is certainly an aspect of the story than makes it seem that Paine began with a vision of the final scene and worked backward from there. But in some ways it is the most intriguing of the bunch--suggesting rather than telling. Markman is a Marine general at the point of retirement who has earned the respect of his men by falling on a grenade (which turned out not to be live) in Vietnam. He has a dark secret, though--he has a fetish for women's lingerie, and the shame of his fetish drives him to self-destructive behaviour. The cause-and-effect of Markham's life is not clear. Paine hints that his fetish developed in the battlefields of Vietnam, where his wife's underwear (originally sent as a reminder of her?) took on a totemic power providing for his personal safety, and that Markham's valiant grenade dive was actually an attempt to destroy himself. Markham finally manages at least professional self-destruction, but somehow Paine's story doesn't quite come off. Perhaps it is as simple as needing to know what happened next. But it certainly has one of the most shocking opening lines I've read, "The General's panties were too tight."

If the 1996 anthology is any measure of the quality of the whole, New Stories from the South is a series to watch out for. 15 stories and not a bit of absurd gunplay, just touching or amusing slices of Southern Life.