For any number of reasons, good and bad, the short-story form no longer holds the cachet it once did. And rumors of a resurgence have yet to materialize.
That said, a tome which purports to present “the best stories of the American West” goes out on a literary limb not once, but twice.
Who’s to say what constitutes the “best” and just what is the West?
Unlike the South of William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Truman Capote, the American West – notwithstanding Zane Grey and Tony Hillerman – has not been a short-story seedbed since the days of Brett Hart, Mark Twain and Jack London.
Neither do we think of Los Angeles writers from John Fante to Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion as particularly Western.
Despite the double difficulty in meeting its billing, Marc Jaffe’s just-published collection, “Best Stories of the American West” delivers on several levels.
With 20 carefully culled stories, Jaffe gathers mostly contemporary tales by women, American Indians and Hispanics, along with the usual WASPier suspects. The collection takes us inside the worlds of modern cow punchers and ranchers, urban Indians in Seattle and on the reservation in venues most of us know little about.
From many viewpoints, all of the stories look at loss, friends, death and funerals – in short, the stuff of life not offered on reality TV.
In Richard Wheeler’s “Hearts,” we go back in time to Tombstone, Ariz., in 1881 for a fanciful twist on Tombstone’s “Gunfight at the OK Corral” moment of immortality.
“Hearts” has Pinkerton Detective Agency agent and gambling hall operative Laura Duvall shut out of the gaming action by rules allowing no women to run the tables. She is also snooping for the firm in the Tombstone of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and his mistress, famous madam “Big Nose” Kate, who befriends Laura.
Readers also get a vintage tale by Elmore Leonard and one by John Sayles. Leonard’s 1953 “The Hard Way” deals with a Mexican deputy and the odds he faces in a frontier town. It was done before Leo-
nard turned to crime novels.
Sayles’ “Dillinger in Hollywood” has aged stunt men in a Hollywood nursing home recalling their golden years of the 1930s and ’40s.
At a time when many parts of the West skate dangerously close to becoming like the rest of the country, this collection holds true to both the physical and mental terrain of what’s still indigenous in the West.
There’s not a strip mall or gated community in sight, or tedious accounts of urban angst suffered by the 20-somethings who populate some of today’s short story landscape.
The tales are all good, but some stand above the rest. Luis Alberto Urrea’s “Farewell to Her Many Horses” plumbs cross-cultural antagonisms on and off a Lakota Sioux reservation.
Sherman Alexie, who is known for his “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” screenplay, contributes “Whatever Happened to Frank Snake Church?” Alexie, who grew up on the Spokane Indian reservation in Washington state, has Church, who has buried both his parents, convinced he hasn’t been a good enough son to either – at least not in the Indian way.
These are not the kind of stories likely to be found in the New Yorker magazine. And that’s not all bad.
J. Sebastian Sinisi is a freelance writer in Denver.
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FICTION
Best Stories of the American West
Volume I
Edited by Marc Jaffe
$25.95
