Short Stories Are not Real Life : Stories

In these fourteen beautifully crafted stories David R. Slavitt shows his mastery of the form. Elegant, spare, sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac- this collection reflects a writer in admirable control of his craft. The title story (complete with footnotes á la The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction) braids together the tidy conventions of fiction and the brutal reality of New York as a writing teacher ponders s student's sexually explicit story that may- or may not- be autobiographical. In The Impostor a writer's brother exploits the legerdemain of fiction in a series of ever-bolder impersonations. Several of the stories are presented by emotionally wounded narrators, disillusioned men looking for a hint of grace in a world where expectations are frequently doomed to disappointment. In such a world only one thing is certain we will hurt- and be hurt by- the ones we love. And in the vacuum left when traditions that might have been redemptive have lost their meaning, ""punishment gets to be a habit, a way of life, or at least something to hold onto."" The stories pivot on nuance, on the half-realized insight, on ""some perfectly innocent and insignificant insight, on ""some perfectly innocent and insignificant gesture that turns round and grows into a medium-to-large awkwardness."" We find what the divorced father futilely awaiting his daughter's visit in Hurricane Charlie calls ""dabblers in distress"": lonely, decent people trying to discover where love- and life- went. In Simple Justice a man striving for some definitive family memory compares the process to archaeology: ""The shards that remain are pathetically small and almost grudging."" Thus through the faltering memory of an elderly cousin in ""conflations"" a man becomes a kind of incarnation of his own father and for a moment finds himself at the ""vanishing point"" where a lost past meets an unknowable future; in The long Island Train a simple anecdote becomes a metaphor for the opacity of the most apparentl