Editor: Garrison Keillor, best known for NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion.
Category: Contemporary Literature, American Literature, Anthology, Short Stories
Why I Read It:
Reading Time Period: July 21, 2010-July 26, 2010. It's the first weekend of Cheyenne Frontier Days, quite possibly my only Frontier Days, so I've been all over the city and left with no time to read. At least this weekend was only the Brooks and Dunn concert. I've got a feeling it's going to take over a week to read my next book, at least.
Book Printing and Condition: Printed 1999 by Houghton Mifflin Company in the United States of America. The book is a little bit more shopworn than the other BASS I got from Night Heron Books. The front cover is a little loose and the spine is broken between pages 178 and 179. Also, throughout Edith Pearlman’s “Chance” there are handwritten notes from the last owner explaining pretty much every Jewish reference, and I have no idea if the person had to look it up for himself and write it in to remember or just figured whoever read the book next wouldn’t know what the Torah was. If it’s the latter this guy is kind of an ass. Thanks, guy, but I know what ‘goy’ means. He also takes the time to define ‘rueful’ at the very end.
Where I bought it: The Night Heron Books in Laramie, WY for $5
Thoughts: This is the first BASS I’ve read where I feel like I can see the guest editor’s hand behind the choices. I don’t listen to NPR and have only vague references to A Prairie Home Companion lodged into my brain (“Stupid TV! Be more funny!”) but even without knowing what kind of guy Garrison Keillor is there are similarities between these stories that make it obvious they were chosen by the same man. Each story utilizes language in a very unique way.
Sometimes the phrases used are ingenious to the point of inducing sickening jealousy. “Appetites” by Kathryn Chetkovich had one that really got me: “We didn’t really look alike, but you’d describe us with the same words on a driver’s license: brown, brown, corrective lenses.” I read that I was utterly gob smacked and immediately pissed I hadn’t thought of it myself. Another one that made me incredibly jealous was this from Emily Carter’s “Glory Goes and Gets Some”: “…because I know very well what happens when you run towards the horizon; you get smaller and smaller until you vanish.”
It is lines like that make me appreciate doing drafts and rewrites. A line like that is only breathed into creation two ways: a mid-moment spark that demands to be written in somewhere, and sometimes gets a whole story created around it, or it is an evolution, a process. Once upon a time those lines were a different version, mundane and boring, and Chetkovich and Carter just kept chiseling away at it until they had found the exact right way to make it perfect.
There are also stories filled with phrasing that isn’t exactly clever or funny, but just well written and beautiful, like from “The Blue Devils of Blue River Avenue” by Poe Ballatine:
“The mist did not lift for a long time. Some days it was so thick you couldn’t see the hands on your watch. It was clammy and smelled of mushrooms and bandages and Styrofoam cups. It spun and drifted with a lime tint on its edge, and did not stop at your eyes but trickled and pooled in creepy lagoons all the way down to the bottom of your brain.”“Welding with Children” by Tom Gautreaux is a good example of using voice to perfection. “Penance” by Matthew Crain also has a very unique voice that takes the story up a notch and makes it something more than just a relation of facts, but Gautreaux’s story wins this contest, I think, for one solid reason: He got me to pronounce ‘pecan’ differently in my head. I always say ‘peh-CAHN’ in that northern way that can anger so many people. But Gautreaux had crafted his characters with such excellent voices that it wasn’t me thinking pecan, it was Fordlyson saying ‘PEE-can.’
The topics also betray Keillor. For the most part the stories he picks are family related in one sense or another. Quite a few of them seem to be set not in the eighties and nineties but earlier, in the first half of the century. And it seems the darker the subject matter the peppier the stories: I thought “Glory Goes and Gets Some” by Carter and “People Like That are the Only People Here” by Lorrie Moore were upbeat and even had me laughing out loud a few times, despite dealing with some difficult situations.
This is an excellent collection, and I really admire the work Keillor did picking these stories out. I like this collection more than I did BASS 1997, although not by much.
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