Acquainted with the night.

I'D RATHER DRINK while-blood spritzers than review a short-story collection. This is not automatic writing for me. How do you do it well in eight hundred words? There is the checkout-counter method, of course: name each story, give 15-word plot wrap-up, grade pass/fail or incomplete. Then again, I could isolate one or two "typical" fictions--which probably aren't typical at all and would distort the collection. I've often used thematic approaches: you know, dig up some air-stream filter of a motif and blow the entire package through it. Pure critical conceit usually: a decent writer (and Miss Schwartz is quite decent) will be too various for one building code. How about the sound-check approach? Analyze diction and voice. But, same trap there, any fiction writer worth his or her rhino should be able to pump fake and change style 16 different ways in 16 different stories. A review of either sort will impute more structure or monotone to the book than it really has. My strainometer, at this point, hits OVERLOAD. And yet I knew there was something familiar about the whole Schwartz collection.

Then I remembered that packet of 15 or 16 short tales they mail me before I teach at a college fiction workshop. Five about some normal to dull housewife or CPA who had (or let go by) his/her small epiphanic moment. One fable in style. Several childhood souvenirs: piano teacher or schoolmate reappreciated. One absurd-permeating-the-commonplace narrative: insistent weird strangers moving into your apartment, say. And at least three about a cancer-riddled parent. Material meant for the better sort of short-fiction market--Plowshares or Transatlantic Review. All deeply concerned with real folk who have real crises that we (the class and I) can relate to. Never do I get a submission about Hitler or Shiloh or exploding stars. American short fiction isn't just short. American short fiction is little. Universal, yes, in the human sense, but so safely universal.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is often a good writer: perceptive, smooth, careful. But her technique, despite shift of voice and style and subject matter, bleeds through like a basement-wall leak done over with cheap silicone paint. This is literary-conference writing: the kind you get grants for--or are in residence at Very Liberal Arts U to do. When beginning, middle, end structure seems appropriate, her end will be just somewhat predictable. Whenever she has chosen the Enigmatic Conclusion (another admissible form), that enigma, that dying fall, is palpable and mute and over-ambivalent as lox on a bed of crushed ice. Hard to find fault with, extremely serious and acceptable--which is something you pick up when writing for teachers.

There are no sudden, plasma-torch metaphors in Acquainted with the Night. No defiant, new POV. Miss Schwartz is an adept stylist, but never riskful and, because of that, also never vulnerable or surprising. Radical experimentation in short-fiction prose has been demode since 1959 or so. Miss Schwartz's ear is admirable: it can overhear just the right ludicrous or mundane or ironic phrase that disjointed, sad people might say. Yet her ear is passive, on RECORD. It doesn't create--or retune anyhow--the language she has been wiretapping. Her fable voice is fabulous enough. The teenage girl will speak accurately--in character but not in exciting character. Miss Schwartz's descriptive style is unexceptionable: "Charlotte was energetic: her healthy exuberant face shone with life and motion." So. Good. So? Personal reminiscence is evocative, yet written in a dependable, humanistic tone. Miss Schwartz cares about her people: she has compassion. Short stories, in fact, long ago became the Tip O'Neill art form. They're now some kind of auxiliary to social outreach (though never read by the people they reach out for). But still I'd have to give Miss Schwartz an A+ at my Rochester University summer writing seminar.

The trouble with short fiction in America is that people try to teach it. (Novels aren't quite so afficted. Classroom scheduling won't accommodate the longer form.) And people who teach short fiction come, in general, from an academic background. I probably needn't tell you what that might imply about their political and social inclination. The peer pressure is portside. (Add to this a contracting magazine market, also edited by associate professors of Deep Concern.) I can sympathize: in order to get published at all by Zeitgeist Review you require much Correct Thought. Short fiction is no longer a neutral genre, rather it is almost a class expression: elitist, condescensive, narrow, "caring," and relatively untimaginative. Acquainted with the Night is good, even virtuous-good, decent reading--and an epitome as well as a collection. It will mark for you the precise state of short fiction today.