"The Penguin book of New American Voices" by Jay McInerney (ed) (Penguin, 1995)

Short stories by Jennifer Egan, Donna Tartt, David Foster Wallace, etc - all people whose career started in the 90s. In his introduction, McInerney writes

• "The aesthetic battles of the sixties and seventies had perhaps their final shootout in a debate between John Gardner and William Gass in the mid seventies. In a series of essays and a book, Gardner attacked the metafictionalists and numerous straw men of letters, arguing for the eternal verities, for character-based, naturalistic fiction which deals with moral issues. Gass elegantly sneered at this reactionary didacticism, and argued that literature was made of words, pure and simple, and had nothing to do with the world" (xiii)
• "in the seventies ... the short story flourished by virtue of being far more teachable than the novel. At the same time, the university itself, and the thousands of trained readers/writers it was producing, became the primary market for this new product, a kind of literary perpetual-motion machine" (xvi)

The editor adds "I was not seeking a politically correct diversity, nor trying to make a case for multiculturalism".

• "The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven" (Sherman Alexie) - Working in - and using - 7-11s.
• "River of names" (Dorothy Allison) - What happen in big familes.
• "Her real name" (Charles D'Ambrosio) - I liked it. A man who's just left the navy picks up a girl from a filling station. He comes to realise that she's dying. They stay on the road for 5 weeks, using his money up -
  • "When the road-signs flashed by, luminous for an instant, Jones felt as though he were journeying through a forgotten allegory"
  • "the unnatural blue of a swimming pool shimmered without revealing any depth in the morning sun. A slight breeze rippled the water, and an inflated lifesaver floated aimlessly across the surface"
  She quickly deteriorates. She thinks her step-father (whose church made a miracle happen, causing the cancer to go into remission) is after them. She wants the man to pray with her. An alcoholic ex-doctor helps them, giving them morphene. At the end he weighs down her body and buries it at sea - "all this would one day break from its deep hold in the sea, wash to the surface, the bumper stickers from Indian battles, the decals commemorating the footpaths and wagon trails of exploreres and pioneers, the resting places of men and women who'd left their names to towns and maps. And then the girl herself, identified by her remains, a story told by teeth and bones"
• "Granny Myna tells of the child" (Robert Antoni) - parts confused me but I wasn't interested in re-reading it - "I answer him that this frogchild have make he brain viekeevie now for true, because is no me a-tall to touch that crapochild". A deformed child is born to Barto and Magdalena (who isn't his wife). The child is bottled and carried to water - it's still alive.
• "The Stylist" (Jennifer Egan) - disappointing. A stylist sleeps with the photographer on a photoshoot in Africa, the new young model fancying the photographer. The stylist, 36, has few photos of herself - she preferred travel to marriage, She advises the model
• "Capricious Gardens" (Jeff Eugenides) - I didn't see much in it. It's set in Ireland. Rich Sean (43) with friend Malcolm find young Americans Amy and Maria who've been travelling for 5 weeks. Plain Maria wants to sleep with pretty Amy, who wants to sleep with Sean. Malcolm tells them about his recent suicide attempt. Maria saves Amy from Sean.
• "Cowboys are my weakness" (Pam Houston) - Homer is the narrator's friend with benefits. He inspects ranches and takes her with him. She's on the look-out for the cowboy of her dreams. Maybe Monty is that cowboy. David the ranch-owner likes her. Homer says he intends to propose. She leaves the ranch early, heading home.
• "I was infinitely hot and dense hot (Mark Leyner) - Even in small doses I'd have trouble with passages like - "At the end of the bar, a woman whose album-length poem about temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ) had won a Grammy for best spoken word recording is gently slowly ritually rubbing copper hexafluoroacetylacetone into her clitoris as she watches the hunk with the non-Euclidian features shoot a glob of dehydrogenated ethylbeneze 3,900 miles towards the Arctic archipelago"
• "Crusader Rabbit" (Jess Mowry) - Raglan goes round with a 13 y.o. junkie Jemery. They survive by recycling stuff they find in dumpsters. They find a dead body (baby? junkie?) in a dumpster. Raglan found Jeremy when he was nearly dead. Jeremy's soon going to give up injecting completely. He thinks Raglan might be his father - why else would he help?
• "Letters to home" (Robert O'Connor) - it begins with rather too much detail about injecting, but romps along after that. I liked it.
• "F**king Martin (Dale Peck) - I like this. The gay narrator's oldest intimate friend Susan wants to get pregnant again with his help. His partner has died of AIDS. He recalls his history of love and sex - S/M etc. "he undid the buttons one by one, his fingers working down his chest, a V of skin spreading behind his passing hand like the wake of a boat"
• "Alana" (Abraham Rodriguez Jr.) - Alana had been a sex-worker living with her sister until her friend Wanda suggested that she try to hook up with rich drug-dealers. "Alana had been deeply grooving to her own inner vibe when the prettiest little boy she had ever seen strolled right into view, tall and sleek, with dope threads". But her new partner beats her. He passes her on to another man (he lost her in a bet). The other man is kind, and might punish the first man.
• "Totally nude live girls (Gail Donohue Storey) - Beyond me - e.g. "She danced into the end of tradition/era. She went right up to the end of (    )ess, (   )ton, and possible (   )tion. ... We make ourselves a small thing. Poppy was our red name, our now name is Aureole. Aureole had a brotheress" etc.
• "Sleepytown" (Donna Tartt) - During childhood she spent 2 years drugged up on medicines thanks to her great-grandfather. She lived with her mother and old relatives. She thought she'd die before her great-grandfather. Much later she read De Quincey.
• "The blue wallet" (William T. Vollmann) - It's introduced as a true story. It's about skinheads - mostly females - and Korean racism. Jenny loses her blue wallet - "If this had been a Chekhovian story, or a tale from de Maupassant, the blue wallet would have turned up eventually, proving by its determined refusal to be elsewhere that all suspicions had been reified to the point of logical and moral death, so that now, as all the thought-chains strained inside our brains, and the little homunculi downshifted the thought-gears to provide maximum mechanical advantage in their futile attempt to drag the blocks of leaden trust back to safety ...". I don't get it.
• "Forever overheard" (David Foster Wallace) - A boy spends his 13th birthday at a public swimming pool. He queues for the high board. There are 2 dark footmarks at the end of the board. He enjoys the new sensations from this elevated, detached viewpoint. Finally, "The board will nod and you will go, and black eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-blotched sky, punctured light emptying behind sharp stone that is forever. That is forever. Step into the skin and disappear. Hello."

Other reviews

• Hugh Barnes (In what may be seen as a backlash against the elitism of Donald Barthelme and other postmodern miniaturists, the stories in this collection focus on the burgeoning American underclass, with its drug culture and violence. ... So much for the American dream, you might think, and you'd be right, because the one thing McInerney's cowboys, indians and commuters have in common is first-hand experience of a contemporary nightmare. ... And yet, for all the variety of accents and idioms in this volume, there is a worrying sameness to much of the material, a dazed fugginess)