Pre-Remaindered

lèvïew" Pre-Remaindered Pete Coco The Best American Short Stories 2005 Edited by Michael Chabon Houghton Mifflin http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 320 pages; paper, $14.00 I buy a lot of my books in thrift shops, and there's no denying it: like neon windbreakers, old Christmas LPs, and Streisand albums (and especially old Streisand Christmas albums), the Best American anthologies are overrepresented among the ranks of the too-good-to-trash but not-quitegood -enough-to-keep. Boon to the used book consumer notwithstanding, it's a peculiar place to find the "Best" anything, and I'm not sure what's responsible for this trend. Have the best short stories of years past, like so many Hyundais, simply lost value with age? Or perhaps as a result of holiday release, aggressive marketing ("First, Best, and Bestselling"), and widespread outfacing in the bookstores, the anthology is purchased more often than it is actually read. Whatever the reason, the Best American series will always sell better than most short fiction, even as each edition will likely fade away under the weight of such extravagant claims. Somehow, anthologizing stories renders them a little more like products to be used—and used up. Ferje Vedfamner, purportedly the alter ego of fantasy writer Jeff VanderMeer, parodies this glut of "Best" in today's book market in a "special report" for Locus Online: Several publishers have just announced plans for year's best anthologies, creating concerns that an already crowded field could become its own sub-genre, which would then require its own year's best. "I have no idea if these are the twenty best stories published in the United States during 2004, or not," guest editor Michael Chabon disclaims in his introduction to this year's edition. "These are the twenty stories that pleased me best." With the above concession, Chabon disarms both the anthology's central appeal and its biggest target for critical sniping: its presumption of aesthetic authority. What's more, he admits to the ephemeral nature of his task: "Pleasure is easily synthesized, mass-produced, individually wrapped. Its benefits do not endure, and so we come to mistrust them, or our taste for them." Maybe because he does away with literary fiction's presumptions of lasting cultural authority (arguably an anachronism, given the realities of modern publishing), Chabon can get away with including a fair bit of genre fiction in the name of entertainment. Writers like Kelly Link, Dennis Lehane , Tim Pratt, and Cory Doctorow strike a contrast to the other, more "literary," names also found in the table of contents. Still, nine of the twenty selections here come from either the Atlantic Monthly, Harper 's, or the New Yorker, and the usual suspects, writers like Joyce Carol Oates, Edward P. Jones, and Alice Munro, are well represented. Chabon certainly doesn't go as far out on his chosen limb as he might. Then again, as nice as it would have been to see the stories of other important genre innovators —writers like Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, and China Mieville, to name a few—there isn't a literary tastemaker out there who's done more than Chabon to legitimize genre fiction. Still, Chabon's apologia to entertainment seems to take the wrong tack. Defending entertainment as good fun plays right into the metanarrative Chabon argues against: namely, that that which we enjoy and that which is good for us often exist in diametric opposition. Chabon acknowledges this assumption, but doesn't quite address it. What's more, the aforementioned contributions of Link and Doctorow directly contradict it. Link's "Stone Animals" is as dramatic and character-driven as any other in the anthology, but it pushes expectations and character with its choice of setting: a haunted house besieged by tiny, rabbit-riding men with spears. In place of an epiphany , one of her characters stops worrying about all the tensions in his life and literally metamorphoses as he stands among the rabbits on the lawn, looking at his haunted house from their perspective: Here's the yard, and here's his house. He loves his house, how it's all lit up. . . . His neighbors: he loves his...