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  • Textured World
  • Garry Craig Powell (bio)
Anatolia and Other Stories. Anis Shivani. Black Lawrence Press. http://blacklawrencepress.com. 266 pages; paper, $16.00.

It is a truth universally acknowledged—well, very nearly—that the American short story has become homogenous, predictable, boring; and literary curmudgeons point their fingers at MFA programs, those fictioneer factories whose workshops turn out tales which, if they were cars, would be Toyotas and Hondas, reliable but bland. And the grumblers have a point. Contemporary American writing is often insular, self-indulgent, and solipsistic: think, on the one hand, of the myriad stories and novels about marriages unraveling in the Midwest; or, on the other, of the arid intellectual games and wordplay of Paul Auster, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Lethem, the emperors who wear no clothes (though we dare not admit it).

So it is a relief to plunge into the richly textured world of Anis Shivani, a world that is complex and multicultural, where rich Malaysians in Houston may navigate local society more successfully than their native Texan childminder, where a Chinese American conservator steals a Jean-Antoine Watteau painting from her own museum to protect it from overzealous restorers, and the past finally catches up with an illegal Indian worker in Dubai. Shivani displays an astonishingly broad and deep knowledge of cultures as multifarious as Hungarian gypsies in the Midwest, Baha'is in Iran, and Jews in the Ottoman Empire of the eighteenth century. And not only does he write about globalization with authority, verve, and intelligence, but with originality, too.

In "Go Sell It On the Mountain," the weakest story, a young writer affirms his belief that "real writers, real artists, didn't join academic programs: they were naturally forged from the flux and flow of normal stressful life." One cannot help suspecting that this is thinly disguised autobiography, and this is the author's own credo. At any rate, I hazard a guess that Shivani is not a graduate of any MFA program. This has advantages and drawbacks. On the plus side, he doesn't sound like anyone else writing nowadays. He frequently ignores the workshop commandment to show, not tell; this makes for less drama, but greater depth. He also ignores F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum, that character is action, instead giving us detailed, and penetrating portraits, in the style of Henry James or Edith Wharton—and yes, his sentences can be as ponderous and plodding as theirs. And like a nineteenth-century novelist, too, some of his stories have an omniscient point of view, which is hard to pull off in short fiction, and yet he manages it. Indeed, for all his probably willful ignorance of the canons of contemporary taste—no traces here of Raymond Carver or Robert Coover, of John Cheever or Flannery O'Connor—this is clearly the work of a "real writer."

Indeed, the collection has garnered lavish pre-publication praise from eminent editors Sven Birkerts, Jay Parini, and Richard Burgin—the latter admiring Shivani's "extraordinary intelligence…his intensely empathetic feelings for his characters and for the endlessly mysterious experience of existence itself," which sums up the author's gifts well. I also concur with Eric Miles Williamson, who points out that the echoes in these stories "harken back to the masters." This is particularly true in the best stories in the collection, "Dubai," "Conservation," "Anatolia" (an astonishing evocation of a vanished empire), "Independence" (set in Pondicherry, India, just as it gains independence from the French in the early 1950s), and "Tehran," a story about a suicide bomber that reveals an insider's knowledge of contemporary Iran.

All the same, gifted as Shivani undoubtedly is, his writing is not without flaws. He has a tin ear, like Theodore Dreiser and Vladimir Nabokov. Shivani is capable of penning what Hamlet would have called "a vile phrase" like this one: "On his short height, he strode as magisterially as he could down the corridor…"; or, worse still, "my clunky car speared higher and higher along Route 125 in the dissipating early August fog, the stately rows of sugar maples bestowing paradisial shade on my bohemian carriage." One wishes a Max Perkins or a Gordon Lish had...

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