Prize Stories: Texas Institute of Letters ed. by Marshall Terry (review)

Reviews 163 Predictably, Soto’s language is . . . well, poetic. A pensive father, he describes his young daughter, Mariko in “Taking Notice”: “Her body will be in bud; shoulders, breasts, the hip’s curve like a mathematical equation that can’t be solved.” Another equation that can’t be solved is the one that allows an artist to see and say things that most people simply miss. Gary Soto is, in any case, one of the gifted, and this slim book is a joy to read, even when, wondering about the endless palaver of intellectuals, he brings a reader up short: Today we want an indirect life: we want to talk, to think about our fate, that blackness, that grave that will rain dirt on our faces and run a root through an ear until we can really hear. GERALD W. HASLAM Sonoma State University Prize Stories: Texas Institute of Letters. Edited and with an Introduction by Marshall Terry. (Dallas: Still Point Press, 1986. 214 pages, $18.95.) Even if Prize Stories hadn’t received an Award of Merit at the Western Books Exhibition, it would deserve to be read and recognized as outstanding because of the excellent short stories contained between its covers. The fourteen stories here were chosen, from 1972 to 1984, as the “best” Texas short stories for each of the given years (two of them tied for the award in 1978). That is not to say they exhibit any provincial regionalism, nor that they all deal with Texas or Texans. Indeed, not all of them take place in Texas (one takes place in Viet Nam, one in Jamaica, one in Africa, and one in Arkansas and Louisiana). Noteworthy, too, is that the time period spanned by the stories extends from the 1840s to the 1980s, the ages of the protagonists extending from around twelve to eighty. Most important, though, is the fact that the writing through­ out this collection is uniformly excellent; most of the major characters (as well as many of the minor ones) are originally drawn and unusually memorable. Granted, there are small things in some of the stories one might note as deserving more of the given writer’s attention: e.g., the needlessly heavy use of medical patois in J. Y. Bryan’s “Frontier Vigil,” the still-evident signs of debt to Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” in David Hall’s “The Smell of Bertha’s House,” the essayistic quality of Marshall Terry’s “The Antichrist,” or the stilted dialogue and flat minor characters in Allen Wier’s “Campbell Oakley’s Gospel Sun Shines on Roy Singing Grass.” Nevertheless, with the exception of Terry’sWendland and Roland Sodowsky’smbakara (in “Landlady,” a brutally realistic story about imperialism), all the major characters are implicitly rendered essentially admirable individuals because they all struggle more or less with themselves—with their own limitations, as well as with those imposed upon them by their environments. Such struggles are complemented by humor 164 Western American Literature in Michael Blackman’s “The Golden Shadows Old West Museum,” Doug Crowell’s “Work,” and Thomas Zigal’s “Curios.” The humor in all three is particularly moving because it intensifies rather than mutes the author’s depic­ tions of the poignantly human struggle to maintain an authentic identity in an increasingly bland and homogenized world. It is not too much to say that Prize Stories deserves numerous readings. DAVID A. CARPENTER Eastern Illinois University O. Henry’s Texas Short Stories. By O. Henry. Edited by Marian McClintock and Michael Simms. (Dallas: Still Point Press, 1986. 291 pages, $19.95.) With this new selection of O. Henry short stories we are again able to enjoy the O. Henry we know well, the one whose short stories have surprise endings, wonderful ironies, rascally tricksters, and playful language. In addition, by selecting only stories about Texas, the editors have provided us with an oppor­ tunity to see another facet of O. Henry’s talent, his ability to give us a realistic picture of a time and a place. W'eare given a view of life in a part of Texas little used for fiction, that part from Laredo to San Antonio, and more particularly...