Bookmark: Lots of standouts in ‘Best American Short Stories’
You don’t know a city — really know it, that is, as opposed to just learning the bus routes and having a favorite bar — until you’ve walked a mile in its fictions. Until you see the way great fiction writers deal with the city.
Among the best stories in “Best American Short Stories 2011” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the annual collection of top-notch tales scheduled to be published Tuesday, is one titled “Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart” by Rebecca Makkai. This marks the fourth year in a row that Makkai, author of the novel “The Borrower” (2011), has had a story selected for the prestigious volume.
It’s easy to see why editors love her work: It’s crisply written and fast-moving, with plenty of nifty observational details. But there is also an underlying seriousness, a thoughtful and sometimes even heartbreaking moral core.
“Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart” is about a Chicago actor who suddenly can’t act. He just can’t do it anymore. In the middle of “Richard III,” he “fell to pieces,” recalls the story’s narrator, a high school chum.
The story’s big moment occurs during an event at the Art Institute of Chicago at which local writers have been hired to offer vignettes relating to famous paintings. It would be unsporting to reveal what happens, except to note that the narrator finally is able to put his finger on why Peter matters to him: “Ours was a kind of first love that wasn’t aimed at each other, but somehow out at the world.” What a gorgeous concept: A doomed love affair not with another person, but with life itself.
Other standout stories in this collection — one of the best in series history — include “Housewifely Arts” by Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Soldier of Fortune” by Bret Anthony Johnston, “Foster” by Claire Keegan, “Phantoms” by Steven Millhauser and “The Call of Blood” by Jess Row.
Disappointing stories by usually reliable writers include “Property” by Elizabeth McCracken and “La Vita Nuova” by Allegra Goodman.
The best thing about the 2011 edition — along with Makkai’s story — is the introduction by guest editor Geraldine Brooks, who offers an eloquent plea for aspiring writers to skip grad school and instead just put a copy of “Best American Short Stories” in a backpack “and go. As far as you can, for as long as you can afford it.”
When you later sit down to write, she concludes, “it will be a better story for the fact that you have been somewhere and carried part of it home with you in your soul.”