Notable

THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES

Edited by John Gardner

Houghton Mifflin; 374 pages; $14.95

This quirky collection is at once heartening and tragic. Almost every story in it is worth rereading, but the book is the last work of its editor, killed in a motorcycle accident 2 1/2 months ago. For the most part shunning pieces that appeared in major periodicals ("all knife-flash, no blood"). Novelist John Gardner also sidelines such contemporary masters as John Updike, Donald Barthelme and Ann Beattie in favor of relative newcomers who display "a new seriousness."

Their gravity is not without instances of whimsy. In William Hauptman's "Good Rockin' Tonight," an insurance man gives up his job to become a Presley imitator, convinced that since both he and Elvis are overweight, admire Cadillac Eldorados and like to stay up all night, he is bound for glory. Nicholson Baker's "K. 590" presents a university string quartet attempting to practice Mozart in a hotel "refreshment room" while the landlady vacuums and a pair of teen-age girls ply a soda machine with quarters.

A few tales blur the line between the superrealistic and the gothic. In "The Gift Horse's Mouth" by R.E. Smith, a rancher's wife has to cut off the head of a dead, possibly rabid mare that had bitten her daughter. In Ian MacMillan's "Proud Monster--Sketches," prisoners of the Nazis bury their own dead: "Returning to the edge of the pit, staggering with exhaustion and aching with hunger, Kratko barely notices that they walk on the girl's back."

The cream of Gardner's choices are stories that bridge these wild swings of mood and tone. Raymond Carver, the John Cheever of machinists and misfits, contributes a characteristically unusual short fiction. By the end of "Cathedral," the sarcastic hero, his eyes shut, is sharing a ballpoint pen with a blind visitor. Together they are drawing a cathedral. "My eyes were still closed. I was in my house and I knew that. But I didn't feel inside anything," he reports. He says to the blind man, "It's really something." Readers of Best American Short Stories will echo that uneasy sense of possibility. As John Gardner's valedictory, it's really something.

BLOOD RIVER

by Barbara Villet

Everest House; 255 pages; $16.95

Alan Paton wrote Cry, the Beloved Country 34 years ago. For generations, that plaint emanated from the country's black majority, imprisoned by apartheid. But now there is a cry on the other side of the barbed wire. It comes from the ruling Afrikaners, whose agony rises from the clash between an irrevocable past and an unrelenting future.

Blood River makes no attempt to whitewash the repressive regimes in Pretoria. But it is one of the few volumes that attempt to understand the descendants of settlers who were themselves the despised and disenfranchised people of the veld. American Journalist Barbara Villet, whose photographer husband grew up in a suburb of Cape Town, starts her journey in modern South Africa, then begins "trekking away from time" back to the 17th century, when a group of Dutch Calvinists sets out for Cape Town. The tiny white minority see themselves as a new chosen people, driven by religious fervor and economic distress. By the 19th century their descendants have become as rooted, as various and as melodramatic as the land. Villet brings them all onstage: the Falstaffian "Oom Paul" Kruger, grandfather to 120, opponent of natives on one hand and Victorian imperialists on the other; Schalk van Niekerk, owner of a "blinklippie," a stone that turns out to be the 83-carat Star of Africa diamond; the Struben brothers, who strike one of the world's richest gold fields on their farm; plus an indelible supporting cast of victims and survivors. The Afrikaners, caroming between wealth and catastrophe, assaulted by tribal warriors, defeated by the British in the Boer War, grow diamond hard with circumstance until today they speak more readily of Armageddon than of dinner. Yet the best of them can see the tragedy of the blacks as the reverse image of their own history, and acknowledge the need for justice. Their dilemma may be insoluble, but whatever answer the future will provide, as one farmer puts it, is "waiting in the shadows." Barbara Villet's unique and grieving work illuminates those shadows sufficiently to prompt sympathy, and to engender hope.

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