'20 Under 40,' New Yorker stories: review

20 Under 40

Stories From The New Yorker

Edited by Deborah Treisman

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 431 pages; $16 paperback)

In a New Yorker cartoon by Henry Martin, a man sits across from a bemused editor holding a manuscript. The caption reads, "I write for the age group thirty-seven to forty-six."

The New Yorker's latest anthology, "20 Under 40," features fiction by 24- to 39-year-olds. It aims to showcase young writers, editor Deborah Treisman notes in the introduction, "who we felt were, or soon would be, standouts in the diverse and expansive panorama of contemporary fiction."

When The New Yorker announced the "20 Under 40" list in June, it inevitably provoked the ire and envy of readers unhappy that their favorite youngish writers (or they themselves) weren't included on the roster. It also raised questions about the project itself: Why single out writers of a particular age group? Why choose 40 as the cutoff point?

But to put together a good collection of stories is its own justification, and this is a good and varied collection. There are stories about anxious mothers and absent fathers, Jesus freaks and fishermen, the cheating and the cheated on - and a number of moving stories about children badly treated by adults.

In ZZ Packer's "Dayward," two young ex-slaves are on the run in post-Civil War Mississippi. Their father, now dead, "had liked to whip them sometimes before bed, and when they asked him 'Why, Papa?' after they'd brought in the moss for the bed ticking and limed the eggs and poured ashes and hair clippings on the little collard garden and done all their tasks right and proper and in full obedience, their father wouldn't or couldn't say."

In C.E. Morgan's "Twins," little Allmon wonders when his daddy is coming home: "He learned to wait before he knew what waiting was, learned to want before he had the words to want with." In addition to these sorrowful familial portraits, a father abandons his small son in an airport in Salvatore Scribona's "The Kid," and a couple react to their teenage son's drug-induced coma in Philipp Meyer's "What You Do Out Here, When You're Alone." These heart-wrenching stories give us soulful characters that are both strong-willed and vulnerable.

Other stories present more quotidian anxieties and disappointments. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's "The Erlking" follows a mother and her little girl to a Waldorf school fair, during which the mother feels bad about not having sent her daughter to such a school. Joshua Ferris' "The Pilot" follows a would-be screenwriter to an exclusive party he's afraid he wasn't really invited to. These slice-of-neurotic-life stories are less interesting than odder works, like Rivka Galchen's "The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire" and Wells Tower's "The Landlord." In the latter story, the narrator's adult daughter, an artist of "leukemia-cluster art, floating-yuan art, water-rights art, and mental-health funding-cuts art," comes to stay with him. "What would it take to thrill you ... what could I possibly show you to put some wonder in your life?" the frustrated father asks.

It's a question that plagues only the privileged. The characters that have endured greater hardship generally possess richer inner lives, while those less battered by circumstance assume an attitude of world-weariness. In Karen Russell's beautifully detailed "The Dredgeman's Revelation," Louis, a Depression-era dredge worker in the Florida swamps, has lost his mother in childbirth and fled from his brutal foster family. But he finds himself flooded with secret joy: "He was in love with everybody, and also with the heat and the stink and the foul teakettle dredge that had cut a channel so far from his childhood. He was in love with the crushed oyster beds and the uprooted trees. He was smart enough, too, to keep these feelings to himself."

In another world, the futuristic New York City of Gary Shteyngart's funny "Lenny Hearts Eunice," Lenny bemoans his fate: "A body at the chronological age of thirty-nine already racked by too much LDL cholesterol, too much ACTH hormone, too much of everything that dooms the heart, sunders the liver, explodes all hope."

Those of us for whom the possibility of being published in The New Yorker before 40 is rapidly passing or has passed already might find some cold comfort in Jonathan Safran Foer's "Here We Aren't, So Quickly." Any life, the story reminds us through a series of poignant juxtapositions, is made up of what doesn't happen as well as what does, and all of it is fleeting. "You're not stacking pebbles on gravestones; I'm not being stolen from my resting mother's arms. Why didn't you lose your virginity to me? Why didn't we enter the intersection one thousandth of a second sooner, and die instead of die laughing? Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?"

Polly Rosenwaike is a freelance writer in Ann Arbor, Mich. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page ED - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle