Best New American Voices, 2006
edited by Jane Smiley, Harcourt, 2005

Here’s an embarrassing admission for a book reviewer to make: the prospect of reviewing a collection of short stories by students in graduate writing programs filled me with not a small amount of dread. I’m no fan of most cutting-edge fiction, and I imagined MFA programs to be a breeding ground for trend-following neophyte writers churning out the worst kind of avant garde gimmickry. Much to my surprise, I found the content of Best New American Voices to be, for the most part, surprisingly traditional and largely free of artifice. These new writers are not iconoclasts, and their stories track much closer to conventional narratives than anyone who reads the day’s buzz-generating professional writers would think possible. There is, perhaps, some hope for the future of fiction after all, even if none of the writers in this particular collection stands out as a brilliant new author sprung fully formed from the mouth of graduate school.

There are a couple of things that come clear as one plows through the stories in this volume. The first is that MFA students - at least the ones represented here - are still being influenced much more profoundly by Leo Tolstoy than by Jonathan Safran Foer. Unhappy families make appearance after appearance in the stories, and as is the tendency in our culture (and especially among post-adolescents), the most common course is to blame the parents for the unhappiness. In “Leave of Absence” by Jennifer Shaff, a young woman entertains delusions of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock as a surrogate father figure to help her through her grief following her parents’ death, and in “Lyndon” a girl bonds with her detached mother after the death of her stoner father. In “Backfire,” Michelle Regalado Deatrick tells the story of a young boy who shoulders the weight of a dysfunctional family, and in “Begin with an Outline” Kaui Hart Hemmings writes about a young woman who struggles with her estrangement from her stoner father (yes, another one). In Sean Ennis’ “Going After Lovely” another boy shoulders the weight of another dysfunctional family. Two stories, Melanie Westerberg’s “Watermark” and Gregory Plemmons’ “Twinless,” deal with issues faced by twin siblings; Plemmons’ story sticks to the dysfunctional family mold, while Westerberg’s gets hopelessly bogged down in metaphor.

The other thing one notices right away is how new these writers are, and that’s new as in young. The aforementioned emphasis on plots driven by character conflicts that can be traced directly back to the parenting mistakes made by Mom and Dad is one clear indicator of youthful storytelling, but so is the vigorous idealism in a few of the stories. Vanya Rainova’s “Trampoline,” about Bulgaria’s post-Communist cultural rebound, is almost too optimistic, while Matt Friedson’s “Liberty,” about imprisoned young people in Vietnam, is cold, if well-crafted. Andrew Foster Altschul takes on domestic violence in “A New Kind of Gravity,” and his story relies on the immaturity of its central character. Elsewhere, Albert E. Martinez’s “Useless Beauty or Notes on Esquire’s ‘Things a Man Should Never Do After the Age of 30’” is about nothing other than protracted adolescence.

Although traditional fiction is more prevalent in the collection than I would have predicted, there’s still a fair amount of formal fiddling going on here. Six of the 15 stories are written in the present tense, a grammatical gimmick that’s old news masquerading as innovative technique, but a few of the writers employ tricks that are destined to be hackneyed next week, if they aren’t already; nearly all of these postmodern doodles are drawn straight out of Dave Eggers’ playbook. Martinez’s story, the one about Esquire mentioned above, uses an Eggers-esque verbose title (see “What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust” in Eggers’ How We Are Hungry), while Hemmings’ “Begin with an Outline” uses the conceit of a story outline in place of an actual story (see Eggers’ “Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone”). Jessica Anthony’s “The Rust Preventer” relies on painfully obvious metaphor (see “After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned” and “When They Learned to Yelp”); it is perhaps notable that Anthony won the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award from Eggers’ McSweeney’s magazine.

Sarah Blackman’s “The Jupiter’s In” is the only story in the collection that dives fully into postmodern formalism. Sentence fragments, bullet-pointed lists, text divisions with faux clever titles and a box drawn around one very large paragraph provide distracting ornamentation to the prose; there are, somewhat suprisingly, no tables, diagrams, cartoons or photographs included, however.

Some of the stories in the collection are admirable and enjoyable: Jamie Keene’s “Alice’s House,” Sian M. Jones’ “Pilot” (which bears a strong resemblance to Arthur Kopit’s play, Wings) and Rainova’s “Trampoline,” among others. Unfortunately, none of the stories is likely to bowl readers over - but if one is to judge these new writers on promise more than accomplishment, there is much here to be happy about.

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