THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 22, 1996 TAG: 9609230251
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH
LENGTH: 71 lines
SUDDEN FICTION (CONTINUED)
EDITED BY ROBERT SHAPARD AND JAMES THOMAS
W.W. Norton. 311 pp. $25.
Writers, from aspiring to experienced, know that it's much more difficult to work short than long.
It's all too easy to write paragraph upon paragraph to capture a scene or convey a feeling. How much harder it is to use just a few well-chosen words - and how much more pleasurable for the reader when this discipline is practiced.
Sudden Fiction (Continued) celebrates the art of brevity, presenting 60 stories whose common thread is that each is no longer than 2000 words. Well-known authors, such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker and Peter Meinke, are mixed in with a host of those less familiar.
The best of the stories use this very short form to delve into a single event illustrating the drama that can unfold in just a moment. In ``The Flowers,'' Alice Walker takes only a page and a half to capture a girl's loss of innocence. It happens to 10-year-old Myop late one summer, when the ``harvesting of the corn and cotton, peanuts and squash, made each day a golden surprise that caused excited little tremors to run up her jaws.''
While gathering blossoms in the woods behind her family's sharecropper cabin, Myop stumbles upon the moldering body of a lynching victim. She ``laid down her flowers. . . . And the summer was over,'' writes Walker, elegantly displaying the transforming power of just a moment.
David Leavitt's ``We Meet at Last'' tells of the instance in which two prospective lovers, who have developed a phone relationship through business dealings but have never met, finally see each other. Not surprisingly, they are disappointed; at the same time, they're reluctant to give up their fantasies.
``If we could only get out of this moment, Jack was thinking, we could go back to our offices; we could go back to our lives and pretend none of it ever happened. And yet they could not - they were not willing - to get out of this moment.''
Robin Hemley brings delicious humor to ``The Liberation of Rome,'' in which a professor of Roman history braces herself to hear a student's inevitable dreary excuse for missing three weeks of classes. Things take an unexpected turn when the girl claims she can't continue in the course because it conflicts with her cultural background - that of the Vandals.
Says the student: ``The only record you have is the record of the Romans. They tell you we were a war-like people who invaded Gaul at the beginning of the fifth century. But that was only because the Huns attacked us first. . . The only reason we captured Rome was to stop their oppression of us. . . We didn't sack Rome. We liberated it.''
Sudden Fiction (Continued) is the third such collection assembled by Robert Shapard and James Thomas, who direct writing programs at the University of Hawaii and Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, respectively. They have included a number of very fine pieces, though some don't quite succeed - generally because their authors try to pack too much activity into this very short form. Characters aren't developed enough to make those pieces compelling.
Even though the stories vary in merit, it's constantly intriguing to observe how the writers test themselves against - and find creative opportunity within - 2000 words. MEMO: Audrey Knoth is a free-lance writer and executive director of
public relations at Goldman & Associates in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Drawing
JOHN EARLE/The Virginian-Pilot by CNB