New American Stories - edited by Ben Marcus

The Granta Book of New American Stories is a daunting slab of a book. Edited by Ben Marcus, it weighs in at over 700 pages and contains short stories by 32 writers, ranging from the feted to the obscure. In his introduction, Marcus says he wants authors who ‘deploy language as a kind of contraband, pumping it into us until we collapse on the floor, writhing, overwhelmed with feeling’: an admirable ambition. But what does this collection tell us about the state of American short fiction?

In Invisible Republic, his critique of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Greil Marcus describes Dylan channelling ‘the old, weird America’, an almost mystical country which was ‘the playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes’ (Luc Sante, New York magazine). The America depicted here, by contrast, contains far less of the carnivalesque.  The overall impression is of a period of prolonged introspection, with the shadows of war and economic near-collapse looming large. White privilege is a theme, as is the way that virtual interactions influence our public perception.

Looking at New American Stories in comparison with Granta Magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists (2013), the collection feels a little introspective. The vast majority of stories are set in the United States, with three set in China, one in Hungary, one in India and one (Zadie Smith’s contribution) in Felixstowe. There is little historical writing, save for The Deep by Anthony Doerr, which takes in the First World War and the Great Depression, and The Diggings by Claire Vaye Watkins, set during the Goldrush.

The collection is at its most successful when traces of the weird break through. Play, by Mathias Svetlana, consists of a set of instructions for surreal and macabre children’s games, examining the way in which we reinforce structural inequalities and prejudice through play. In one game, we are told, ‘the weakest children will close their eyes and return home where they will never be allowed to open their eyes again’. In another, ‘one child is born It’. Lucy Corin’s Madmen describes a world in which adolescents adopt madmen as they might pick a stray dog from a refuge, in the hope that spending time together will teach them about ‘Facing the Incomprehensible and Understanding Across Difference’. The sense is that young Americans need to come to terms with, and learn to control, their id in order to grow up. Kelly Link's Valley of the Girls is another highlight, in which rich kids build their own pyramids; the protagonists are hyper-aware of their legacies and the feeling of being constantly monitored, making this an enjoyably surreal take on the way in we deal with the pressure of our virtual lives.

Also satisfying are the stories which engage significantly with the human impacts of America’s post-capitalist economy. Charles Yu’s Standard Loneliness Package describes the outsourcing of America’s guilt and negative feelings to call-centre workers in the Indian subcontinent, where workers are required to endure twelve hour shifts of ‘grief, embarrassment, humiliation’ to keep Western consciences clear. Hammer and Sickle by Don DeLillo is narrated by a white-collar criminal in a low-security prison camp, filled with disgraced and ruined business executives. One day, his children appear on a television news segment, delivering financial updates. In the wake of a global collapse triggered by Dubai’s building industry, the children’s reports grow increasingly militant: an accusation against the generation which created them and failed them, whilst remaining insulated from the worst effects of the conditions they have created.

Special Economics by Maureen McHugh also stands out for its ambition and imagination. Set in a China which has been ravaged by Bird Flu, McHugh describes a society in which workers have become indentured slaves at tech firms, who export valuable resources to the United States while their own economy crumbles. The story also manages to touch on the aspirational nature and global reach of youth culture, the fading relevance of Sixties revolutionary slogans, and the commercialisation of hip-hop.

As in any anthology, work which strays from the boundaries of conventional narrative structure, or significantly changes the pace of the storytelling, stands out. Such is the quality of Lydia Davies’ prose that she is able to say in four sentences as much as most writers can manage in a novel. Going for a Beer by Robert Coover is the breakneck story of a man on a downward spiral, while The Lucky Body by Kyle Coma-Thompson is sharp, brutal and slightly surreal.

So, which of these authors will build a legacy? Don DeLillo already has, and Lydia Davies certainly will, as will Zadie Smith, though not necessarily as a writer of American short stories. Donald Antrim should, on a cult level at least, as should Joy Williams. Tao Lin's is tarnished already. For most of the rest, we can only speculate. There are certainly plenty of strong contenders, although it would be wrong to judge any author’s prospects simply on the basis of one short story in an anthology. I’ll certainly be looking out for Maureen McHugh and Charles Yu in the future.

Personally, I was delighted to see two of the most interesting and underrated American authors of recent times, Donald Antrim and Joy Williams, included, and hopefully this can help them to achieve a wider readership. I admire the level of Marcus’s ambition, and his willingness to look beyond the big names of American writing. Whether this will hurt the collection’s reputation in the long-run remains to be seen, but avoiding identifying the anthology with a particular trend may be a benefit.

New American Stories is definitely a book to sample in sections, rather than as a continuous read. As with any collection of such depth, there will be peaks and troughs in terms of interest, though it should be said the quality of writing remains high throughout. This doesn’t feel like an especially celebratory anthology, due to the introspective quality of much of the writing, but there are stories which fizz with imagination and style, which approach the world in new and exciting ways, and drag the reader into unfamiliar environments with a few well-chosen words. Judging from this collection, America has been hit with a heavy dose of reality, but there are still traces of the old, weird country poking through.