The Short Story Faces Long Odds

Goodman published her first book of short stories when she was a 21-year-old Harvard senior. Now 29, she has written a collection of 10 interwoven tales about three generations of an archetypal Jewish-American family. The book spans 15 years in the lives of Rose, cantankerous matriarch of the Markowitz family, her two sons, Ed and Henry, and Ed's daughter, Miriam. With an ear for dialogue and an eye for detail, Goodman deftly sketches the rituals of family life--weddings, hospital vigils, holiday dinner squabbles. Rose overdoses on Percodan, Ed battles the indignities of scholarly life, and Miriam unexpectedly embraces orthodox Judaism. Goodman's stories, most of which were first published in The New Yorker or Commentary, touch on a sometimes-tense reality in Jewish America: While the children of East European immigrants have successfully assimilated, many of the grandchildren seek a more Old-World religious life.

In his first collection in a decade, Wolff reconstructs the remarkable texture and pathos of unremarkable lives. The protagonists here are ordinary people confronted with their own delusions, weaknesses and unaccountable desires. Wolff deploys the story as trap. Most of these 15 tales beckon innocently, draw you into their darker depths and finally close with a twist and a tidy snap. He's at his best evoking the dilemmas, pain and strange joys of childhood and adolescence. In "Powder," a boy is won over by his father's mischievous and haunted sense of adventure as they drive together on a stretch of snowy road. In "Smorgasbord," a boarding-school teenager tries to impress a classmate's rich Latin-American stepmother--with hilarious and touching results. This story's first-person narrator looks back on his own youth with an unsentimental honesty characteristic of Wolff: "We're supposed to smile at the passions of the young . . . as if they were no more than a series of sweet frauds we'd fooled ourselves with and then wised up to." Wolff steadfastly refuses to wise up.

Enter at your own risk--Spencer is addictive reading. This collection creates 13 distinct portraits of quintessential America. His characters live banal lives in cheap apartments, state prisons, sad-sack trailer parks, dowdy suburbs and family farms. But his stories transcend place. "The defining moment of your life isn't even from your life," Spencer writes in his first paragraph. "It's from the movies." The thought echoes throughout the book--what is real and what is not? In "Haven't You Ever Seen Cary Grant?" Edna Pelkner, a widow with"hair the color of boiled cabbage," accuses a young college lecturer, Mark Butler, of stealing the fuel pump from her Volkswagen Beetle. It is a farce that becomes a Kafkaesque nightmare when Butler turns into the deranged thief he's accused of being. One after another, Spencer's characters negotiate tortuous and comic twists of fate. "At last you love your life," Spencer writes at the end of his first story. His talent is that you also learn to love their lives.

The narrator in each of these nine stories is Jean, an overweight, middle-aged woman living in Montgomery, Ala. Jean's mother is a cranky meddler who has plenty of advice for everyone and always an extra serving for her daughter. "When Momma can't think of anything to say," Jean laments, "she says it to me." Jealousy in all its forms is at the heart of this accessible and humorous collection. In the title story, Jean is afraid she's going to be replaced by the boarder who moves into her mother's house after her father dies; in "I Never Said a Word," Jean is jealous of her brother, the favored sibling; in "Ecuador," Jean's former boyfriend returns to town, arousing the suspicions of her husband. The stories stand alone--many have been published individually--but also form a cohesive story, giving the collection the feel of a novel.