The Eye-ing of the Essay

American fiffiS" Coake continuedfrom previous page ----------------Yet would any of them have been out of place in O. Henry Prize Stories 1985—or 1975?Apart from some cultural markers, only Alexie's seems to me alive in the now: its story might feel timeless, but its jazzy pace, its subversion of awful sadness, feel, if not experimental, then at least fresh. The stories by Fox, Jones, and Freudenberger—not to mention those by Stuckey-French, Jhabvala, and Rash—are all stolid psychological realism, told in linear fashion—affecting , yes, but traditional all the same. In fact, only a handful ofO. Henry prizewinners make attempts to push the envelope. Gail Jones's "Desolation" is a story of music and a love affair, told almost in fragments; its form is unexpected, unpredictable, and beautifully expressive. Ben Fountain's "A Fantasia for Eleven Fingers," a tale of two eleven-fingered Jewish pianists, has the same disquieting is-it-history-or-isn't-it tone as the darkest of Steven Millhauser, and indulges in a queasy Gothic kick at the end. And then there's Dale Peck's "Dues." It's hard for me to like Peck, given his carefully cultivated attack-critic pose. And I was, in fact, safely disliking his story (too flip, too meandering) right up until its end—whereupon it reveals itself as having been, all along, a story of 9/11. I'm not sure I like the piece as a whole, but I have to admit: this is the first 9/11 fiction I've read that doesn't seem either mincing or a gross miscalculation; it achieves a level of honest sadness at its end without succumbing to sentimentality. Maybe, so soon after the event, it takes a sensibility as prickly as Peck's to invoke those days honestly. Those three stories, plus Brockmeier's—that's the cutting edge, and I'm stretching a bit even to call it that/This isn't a bad thing; the other sixteen stories range from good to great, and even the ones I like least I can respect for their artistry. And in general it seems to me that the O. Henry Awards are being decided with as much fairness and flexibility as is possible. Yet when I finished the anthology, I couldn't help but feel a slight disquiet—in this age of dwindling readerships for literature, when so few stories have a chance of publication, let alone a prize—shouldn't more prizewinners be...well, different, both from stories past and from one another? More apt to redraw the boundaries ofform and content? Isn't there a way to strengthen "the art of the short story" other than by continually shoring up its foundations? But maybe this question is only a quibble. After all, my favorites in this collection are telling: "The Brief History of the Dead" may be read as an experiment in content at least, while "Mudlavia" is solidly traditional, but I suspect I will remember and reread both of them for a long, long while. Perhaps this is simply a sign ofthe contemporary short story's continued vitality—The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 demonstrates that, in the right hands, short fiction can succeed looking either forward or backward. If the art of the story isn't being strengthened here, it is nevertheless proved to be strong. Christopher Coake is the author o/We're in Trouble: Stories (Harcourt), andhis shortfiction has appeared in such journals as The Gettysburg Review, Five Points, Epoch, amiThe Southern Review. He teaches creative writing at the University ofNevada, Reno. The Eye-ing of the Essay Kerry Egan The Best American Essays 2005 Edited by Susan Orlean Houghton Mifflin http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 309 pages; paper, $14.00 In the Best American Essays 2005, editor Susan Orlean presents twenty-five essays culled from magazines andjournals. There are moments ofalmost transcendentbeauty in some ofthese pieces, passages that make the reader draw in her breath and ideas that force one to pause, unable to continue reading until the notion offered or implied has been digested. The essays cover a vast range oftopics, from the secret joy of diagramming sentences in Kitty...