The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Sudden Fiction (Continued) by Robert Shapard and James ThomasJack Byrne
Robert Shapard and James Thomas, eds. Sudden Fiction (Continued). Norton, 1996. 311 pp. $25.00.
How to marry a millionaire? How to steal a million? (Or for that matter, How to stuff a wild bikini?) How to review in less than 400 words sixty short-short stories? One of the above is in Sam Goldwyn’s pithy phrase, “In two words Im-POSSIBLE.” The others are Im-PROBABLE. However, five stories are noteworthy. Thomas McGuane’s “War and Peace” is brilliantly evocative of life aboard a Navy light cruiser in and around the Solomon Islands: “Bodies were always floating past us, Japs and Americans, just bobbing meatballs that used to have moms and home towns.” Ron Carlson’s “The Tablecloth of Turin,” like Robert Benchley’s well-known comic lectures, is a spoof about Leonard Christofferson’s change from an insurance investigator to a zealous lecturer on the Tablecloth of Turin, sold to him on a trip to Italy by Antony Cuppolini, who works in his brother’s restaurant. It is pure tongue in cheek, related as it is to the Shroud of Turin and other variations of the true cross. Mostafa Abd el-Salaam, in Allen Hibbard’s “Crossing to Abbassiya,” has a simple task: to transfer a group of madmen by truck from one side of Cairo to the other. His mind wanders and he finds himself in a café with friends. When he remembers the truck outside, he goes out to find that his charges have escaped. With practical Arab logic he collects the first dozen men who accept a ride to a promised job; he delivers them to the asylum where they are taken in and processed amid their howls and cries. Mustafa returns home! Traci L. Gourdine’s “Graceful Exits” repeats the theme of Summer of ’42, but without the Tea and Sympathy ending. When the young man leaves, both parties are relieved. Arnie Watson (Barry Peters’s “Arnie’s Test Day”) has five tests on Friday. Misusing his natural ingenuity, he turns himself into a human “crib”: the bill of his Bulls cap contains twenty Spanish words, abbreviated versions of the amendments go on the inside of his Reebok polo shirt, notes for The Great Gatsby are entered on the inside of his belt and the pale blue inside of his jeans, quantum physics formulas on the outside of his polyester white socks, and finally “trigonometry notes on the bottom white soles of his Air Jordan basketball shoes.” This is the generation politicos are worried about? This is the third collection of short-short stories by Shapard and Thomas. The majority of these stories are excellent examples of the form. [Jack Byrne]