[In the following review, Amdahl strongly praises Berriault's work and asserts that she is a powerful force against the mediocrity of modern fiction.]

In the absence of a certain peculiar force, the American short story declines swiftly toward the uniform. This may be true of all human endeavor, but in the case of our short fiction, the degenerate form has been made to seem the acme of the art. The teaching of it is liturgical, the writing pious and intolerant of deviation, the reading devotional, the publishing straight-faced. It has been one of the most relentlessly banal decades in the history of U.S. literature, but, I'm happy to say, it's over: A collection of new and selected stories by Gina Berriault (serious readers in the late fifties and early sixties will know this name—she wrote three novels and a volume of stories by 1966, another novel and collection after that—but most will not) is good enough not only to be read enthusiastically, reviewed widely and cheered wildly but to inspire as well, and to be as broadly influential as, perhaps, Ray Carver was (the one guy who could do what he did; and I don't mean to imply that Carverism—Raymond as Jesus with Tobias Wolff the Pope presiding over a bureaucracy of celibate workshop directors—is the only thing wrong with short fiction). If she does get the wide notice she deserves, it will have been a long time coming: Having written so beautifully and so consistently for nearly forty years, she ought to be as familiar to us as Toni Morrison and John Updike.

How she does what she does is less easy to say than that she does it magnificently. It is, for instance, difficult to quote her. She does not indulge in fits of fine language connected by ligamentary plot development. Each sentence is as good, as subtly evocative, as poised and full of import and pleasure as the next. Nevertheless, from "The Island of Ven," in which a terribly ill woman visits the Tycho Brahe museum on an island in the Baltic: "a picture of the Astronomer composed itself for her eyes and for her hand someday: up in his observatory, the young Brahe, his face lifted to that brilliancy, to that inescapable portent, its reflection floating in his eyes, and in the gems on his plump fingers, and in the waters of a fountain, and on every leaf turned toward the heavens." And this, from "Stolen Pleasures," a poor young girl's contemplation of her wealthier friend's piano: "The piano, a huge, flat, forbidding face, until her best friend, Ellsworth, across the alley, sat down before it, lifted the long upper lip, baring the long rows of black and yellow teeth clamped together in an unsightly grin, and with nervous fingers picked out cajoling sounds that meant Please piano, piano, open up a happy future for me, for me, piano, please, for me, for me."

Berriault's imagination and her prose (both are cause and effect at once) are as carefully ambitious and elaborate as Henry James's, her meanings and rhythms as closely allied as Cynthia Ozick's. She reminds me too of Barry Hannah, not so much in the prose itself—Berriault makes a virtue of calm, while Hannah makes one of fever—but in the sense they both give of being somehow unable not to write: A sentence appears before them, and the world spills out of it. Finally it's Chekhov she most calls to mind: Her characters, for the most part, are entrancingly anonymous.

So much current fiction depends on a very narrow understanding of character. Blurb after blurb, review after review, we are assured we will encounter characters we really care about. We will identify with these people because they are just like us. We will bond with them, and share. Berriault, on the other hand, creates characters whom we emphatically do not recognize—or whom we recognize, rather, only in ways that have nothing to do with superficial similarities. (I have had that experience! I have known those mixed feelings!) Describe them how you will—a struggling actress doing social work in a hospital in the title story; a fussy, overly cautious dandy librarian in "Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?"; a classical guitarist at midlife in "Nights in the Gardens of Spain"; a fired school food-service worker in "The Diary of K.W." (one of my favorites)—these are people we do not know, just as we do not know any but an infinitesimal fraction of the people we see each day. They are not "likable," nor are they "unlikable."

Ozick once wrote of Chekhov that when "his characters strike us as unwholesome, or exasperating, or enervated, or only perverse (especially then), we feel Chekhov's patience, his clarity, his meticulous humanity," and this applies perfectly to Berriault as well. She deals with the inner lives of the perforce invisible, and sees no need to force familiarity upon us. One of the most notable features of her work is the absence of categorization, of description by quick (lazy) reference. There are no brand names, trademarks, franchises, buzz words or jargon here, no free rides on fads, no trading on popular issues or current affairs. No one is "alcoholic" or "abused," much less "recovering." Even age, race and gender are more elusive than you expect them to be. This is not slacker fiction or cyberfiction or domestic fiction, not K Mart realism or minimalism, not magic realism, not postmodernism, not avant-pop. It's not multicultural in the corporate sense, it's unicultural, if you will: not monocultural, not balkanized and not exclusive.

Which is not to say the work is not direct, detailed, specific: "Anonymous" does not mean "general" (or "downtrodden" or "neglected" or "residing on the margins of society"—inner lives do not recognize class distinctions), as this quote should make clear:

The Judge's voice was cleaving its way through the soiled air, asking legalese questions and informing each of his destination, which asylum, what refuge. Like a scene in any number of plays, where an assassin or a priest comes to tell the prisoner what his future looks like, this was a scene in a debtors' prison for those who couldn't pay back all that civilizing invested in them. She'd been in even closer proximity to this Judge. A wedding reception at the Stanford Court Hotel atop Nob Hill, where she'd carried trays loaded with prawns and oysters up to that buttoned-up belly.

Over in a few minutes, this orderly dispersal of the deranged. The Judge left and she followed at a discreet distance, noting his brisk sort of shuffle, a slight uncertainty of step that came from sitting in judgment for so many years. If she were ever to play a high-court judge on the stage in the park, she'd stuff a bed pillow vertically down her front and take those small steps, the uncertainty in the head repressed all the way down to the feet.

Fiction has never been so poorly read, poorly understood and poorly represented as it is right now: made up, not true, diverting, entertaining, escapist, therapeutic—this is mock fiction, imitations of a thing easily imitated (by the carefree).

Consider the following, from "The Light at Birth," in which a woman, renting a room on the ocean, apprehends the last moments of a very old woman one floor beneath her:

She was wakened in the night by the strangers at the old mother's garden party. Visions of light and of luminous strangers in that light, that was what the dying saw. She knew who they were, those strangers. They were the first of all the many strangers in your life, the ones there when you come out of the dark womb into the amazing light of earth, and never to be seen again in just that way until your last hours. She got up and walked about, barefoot, careful to make no sound that would intrude on that gathering of strangers in the little room, below.

While it may seem a lot to ask of some short stories, Women in Their Beds could conceivably vindicate the art, and thereby participate in the saving of the Republic. Whether or not certain kinds of novels and stories train readers in the sympathetic imagining of others' lives—from which spring the civic virtues of tolerance and concern for the welfare of all—can be debated. What is incontrovertible is that Berriault writes real fiction.

The epigraph of her previous collection, The Infinite Passion of Expectation, is from Neruda: "and that's how we are, forever falling / into the deep well of other beings." Berriault does not imitate, cater, affect or posture. She deepens reality, complements it and affords us the bliss of knowing, for a moment, what we cannot know.