[In the following favorable assessment of Collected Stories, Williams offers a thematic overview of Gilchrist's short fiction.]

I've always been a fan of Ellen Gilchrist. Partly it's just that the places she loves are also the places I love—San Francisco, New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta and above all the weird and wonderful little university town of Fayetteville, Arkansas. “Fateville,” as one of Gilchrist's characters calls it. When I lived in Fayetteville, just a couple of years before Gilchrist came there to study in the famous MFA program presided over by Miller Williams and Jim Whitehead, I was fond of saying that nobody would ever be able to write a story that captured the essence of the place. I was soon proved wrong by Gilchrist's novel The Annunciation and by many of the stories in this very volume, which were selected by Gilchrist herself from In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Victory Over Japan, Drunk With Love, Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle, The Age of Miracles, The Courts of Love and Flights of Angels.

Gilchrist's first collection of fiction, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, appeared when she was 46 years old. She won the National Book Award in 1984 for Victory Over Japan. In all, she has published seventeen books, and this is not the first collection of her stories to be reassembled from other volumes. In 1995, Rhoda: A Life in Stories gathered a group of related pieces that had appeared in five previous volumes. The idea made a lot of sense. Characters like Rhoda Manning and Crystal Weiss and Nora Jane Whittington reappear from story to story. So does the irresistible Traceleen, Crystal's loyal maid/companion and nanny to her daughter Crystal Anne. And each volume of stories promises to continue the saga of characters Gilchrist's loyal readers already know.

I read each of Gilchrist's books as soon as they appeared, starting back in 1981. And I always experienced the same sensation about halfway through. It was a little like getting a five-pound box of really good chocolates. I'd read far too many at one sitting, savoring the complicated fillings and the beautiful sensuous shapes. And then I'd feel a little sick, and be sorry I hadn't rationed myself to one or two at a time. The downside of Collected Stories, if there is one, is that this is a ten-pound box: 34 stories, 563 pages, a binge waiting to happen. Oh, well. I know what one of Gilchrist's characters would do—go ahead and pig out. And then embark on some extreme diet, where she'd only eat grapefruit or smoke Kool cigarettes until her teeth started to fall out and she'd have to get gum surgery that cost eleven thousand dollars. And then start obsessing about the chocolate again, until finally she'd buy another ten-pound box and eat that too. And then take up Mahayana yoga and get back to a size ten—and do it all over again.

Gilchrist made her reputation writing stories about spoiled, rich, sexy white women who drink and smoke and take diet pills and have affairs and throw outrageous fits. Some of them are girls and some are young women and some are middle-aged. And if this description sounds repugnant to you, you probably haven't read Ellen Gilchrist. Cruising the Web to see what her fans had to say about her, I came upon a testimonial from a young Jewish woman who discovered Gilchrist's stories in junior high school, loved them, devoured them, was completely carried away. Who then a few years later got mad because everybody in the stories besides Traceleen was white and rich and careless. But this young woman admits that she has recently gone back to reading Gilchrist, and she recommends her to other readers as “a guilty pleasure.” She notes that many of Gilchrist's out-of-control girls crash and burn in the end, but also that somehow their horrible fates move us far less than their moments of triumph and sensual excess.

After all, it's hard not to be jealous of a woman who, when in danger of being trounced in a tennis match by a crippled opponent she refers to as “that god-damn little new-rich Yankee bitch,” can cheat to win and then make herself feel better by going to Gus Mayer and buying

some cocktail dresses and some sun dresses and some summer skirts and blouses and some pink linen pants and a beige silk Calvin Klein evening jacket … and some hose and some makeup and some perfume and some brassieres and some panties and a blue satin Christian Dior gown and robe … and some Capezio sandals and some Bass loafers and some handmade espadrilles … and a red umbrella and a navy blue canvas handbag.

(pp. 56-57)

—and who then goes down to the Country Club “to see if anyone she liked to fuck was hanging around the pool.” It's hard not to be a little jealous even if you know (because Ellen Gilchrist has shown you, in rich and clinical detail) that this woman is a pitiful, bitter creature with no self-esteem. The point of the story—or one of the points—is that the Land of Dreamy Dreams will steal your soul. But Gilchrist is so good at describing seductions that we tend to skip over the betrayals.

There are wonderful stories about childhood here, too. “When I was in the third grade I knew a boy who had to have fourteen shots in the stomach because of a squirrel bite,” begins “Victory Over Japan,” a tale about how Rhoda Manning and Billy Monday discover some pornography while collecting magazines for a paper drive. Rhoda writes up Billy's misfortune as a story for the school newspaper, titled “Be on the Lookout for Mad Squirrel.” Her opus begins with the immortal lines,

We didn't even know it was mean, the person it bit said. That person is in the third grade at our school. His name is William Monday. On April 23 he had his last shot. Mrs. Jansma's class had a cake and gave him a pencil set.

(p. 89)

Gilchrist is now 61 years old, and her work keeps getting better—less histrionic, less show-offy, deeper and surer. Collected Stories ends with my favorite tale, “The Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor.” The narrator, Chandler Nobles, says that this story is “really about how Kelly got a new boyfriend but … also about why you should register to vote and vote in every election even if you don't know which one is the worst liar and scoundrel and thief.” But it is also about how Chandler decides that she and her boyfriend, Euland Redfern, who have made love all over Devil's Den State Park, should finally get married and start a family.

Chandler and Euland and Chandler's cousin Kelly are good Arkansas hill people, descended from generations of proud folk who “hate to waste anything.” On New Year's Day they take a walk and meet a man named Ed Douglas, a brand-new professor in the University of Arkansas botany department. Chandler is a teacher and Euland repairs fuel pumps and Kelly works at the Fayetteville Public Library, where she has been reading up on the breeder reactor that was built near Strickler in 1964 “to test whether it would blow up.” They all end up stuck on the roof of the abandoned reactor, and Kelly hooks up with Ed.

These people are hardworking and honest and unspoiled, light-years removed from Crystal Weiss and Rhoda Manning, even though Chandler says at the end that Kelly is ruthless and stubborn and has lost eleven pounds, and that she “will get pregnant if she needs to” in order to marry Ed. The writing seems effortless and completely artless; the characters ring true. Reading this story is like listening to my North Arkansas cousins-in-law chat over Christmas dinner—only better.

Gilchrist is a master at taking the dross of real life and turning it into magic. In twenty years of feverish productivity she has written many other stories just as good as these that are not included in this fine collection. I hope Collected Stories will win her a new generation of readers and lead all of us back to the original volumes.