Connection To Family Marks This Year's `Best'

"The Best American Short Stories: 1996" Edited by John Edgar Wideman Houghton Mifflin, $24.95/$12.95

Recently, I took my review copy of this new collection to lunch.

"Is that the new `Best American Short Stories'?" asked the waitress as she seated me. "I love that book. I buy it every year."

Was she a writer? I asked. No. A student? No. She liked the anthology's variety of authors - famous, unknown, mainstream, experimental - and looked forward to the annual guest editor's choices, which gave each volume a distinctive flavor. For 1996, John Edgar Wideman's taste runs to rich narrative literature often focused on families.

In Akhil Sharma's touching newlywed story, "If You Sing Like That For Me," the narrator discovers to her delight that she has come to love her husband from an arranged marriage.

"The Eve of the Spirit Festival," by Lan Samantha Chang, reveals love's burdens and pleasures in a sweet, self-effacing voice while adopting the less-loved of two sisters as narrator. From her underdog vantage, Claudia watches Emily, her rebellious older sister, contend with their Chinese immigrant father's expectations. Emily hates the man, a long-term associate professor passed over for tenure because of his ethnic origin, and their battles frighten Claudia, who must step in as peacemaker after their mother's death.

By contrast, Susan Perabo's unnamed 18-year-old female narrator in "Some Say the World" is tough and frank, a pyromaniac who knows that her mother is stepping out on her stepfather, the bland Mr. Arnette. Hospitalized three times already, the narrator struggles with the numbing side effects of Xanax and the utter uselessness of therapy. Perabo so vividly portrays this effort - and the misunderstanding of others - that Mr. Arnette's unlikely strength at the end comes as a delicious surprise.

Anna Keesey's epistolary story, "Bright Winter," tells of a father's yearning for a runaway son, and in "Shades," William Henry Lewis' young, unnamed boy attends an annual town festival with his single mother. She points out his father and, like iron attracted to a magnet, the boy draws near, hoping this stranger will recognize him. Jamaica Kincaid's fine "In Roseau" also pivots on a father's role.

Alice Adams takes on anorexia in "Complicities," while Robert Olen Butler's lighthearted "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot" offers welcome humor. Offbeat yet elegant is Deborah Galyan's "The Incredible Appearing Man": During a romance of many years, a woman's plodding but faithful husband's unwitting competition with his wife's more attractive but selfish, undependable lover offers much wit and insight.

In Angela Patrinos' "Sculpture I," the female narrator takes a modeling job and becomes "the only naked woman" in a Pakistani art student's life. Skillfully driving the narrative is the tension between her empathy for his loneliness and her revulsion for him.

And finally, Lynne Sharon Schwartz's Hawaiian tourists in "The Trip to Halawa Valley" had a good time, even as they make up adventures that never happened - a fitting idea for editor John Edgar Wideman, who wanted to select stories that "challenge . . . reality."

Irene Wanner is a Seattle writer and editor.