[In the following review of The Granta Book of the American Short Story, Dickstein praises Ford's introduction to the volume and his story selections, which show “a high standard of literary judgment” and include “many superb pieces of writing.”]

In the United States it is rare for writers to undertake anthologies of their near-contemporaries. Few are ready to do the work of reading their rivals, let alone risk offending everyone by their choices and exclusions. Since publishers have all but given up on the common reader, most American anthologies fall into the hands of academics with eyes on the course-adoption market.

Born in 1944, Richard Ford, the author of four novels and a powerful volume of stories, Rock Springs (1987), is one of the most impressive writers of his generation. The Granta Book of the American Short Story, his large, conscientious selection of American short stories since the Second World War is a significant event, introducing a whole range of recent writers to a British audience. Though by no means comprehensive, the book shows a high standard of literary judgment and contains many superb pieces of writing.

Since Ford and his publisher warn us that this is a personal selection—they even date it from 1944 rather than the more conventional 1945, as if the editor's reading life had begun at birth—it is tempting to look first at what the anthology plays down or leaves out. Had such a book been edited in 1960, it might have featured Southern writers like Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers, New Yorker stories, and the new Jewish stars like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. Every story would have told a real story, with a premium on Jamesian craft and form.

The same book, brought together in 1975, would have looked entirely different. The stories would have been called “fictions”, with an emphasis on the kind of non-linear anti-story that took off with Donald Barthelme in the early 1960s. But the book would also have included a good deal of new Afro-American writing, as well as ribald, formless-seeming black humour, written under the sign of Céline, Henry Miller and Nathanael West. Fifteen years later, in 1990, the same volume, edited by the typical college professor, would have changed just as dramatically; in line with the new curricular trends and the taste of the younger critics, the contents would be “multicultural”, with the stress on black, Hispanic, and Native American authors, on women, and on homosexual writers.

Richard Ford's collection is ecumenical enough to include at least one or two examples of most of the above. It reprints anthology chestnuts that might have appeared in any one of these imaginary volumes, such as Shirley Jackson's mechanical little horror story, “The Lottery”, Flannery O'Connor's brilliantly wicked “Good Country People”, James Baldwin's surprisingly benign ghetto tale, “Sonny's Blues”, and Malamud's wondrous fable, “The Magic Barrel”. But the main thrust of Ford's anthology provides a strikingly different reading of the recent American fiction from the multi-cultural or sexual-political one.

For Ford, it is clear, the mandarin fiction of the 1940s and 50s is quite dead, and the black humour and metafiction of the 1960s look dated. They are not much more than a ghostly presence in this volume. But they've been replaced, not by hyphenated writers, women writers, or gay writers, but by a chastened return to traditional story-telling—by flat, foreshortened, or uninflected versions of the old realism. The writer whose spirit presides over the second half of the book is Ford's friend, the late Raymond Carver, whose first collection of stories came out in 1976 (the same year Ford's first novel appeared).

In his shrewd but curiously defensive introduction, Ford dismisses all such social and critical categories as “just needless envelopes for life and literature”. Admitting the “grouchy traditionalism” of his own taste in fiction, he insists that he chooses stories only because they are absolutely good, because they surprise him or because of the quality of their writing. “I've always liked stories that make proportionately ample rather than slender use of language”, he writes. But, in fact, nearly everything in the book flows from his affinity for Carver's downbeat blue-collar realism, with its grimly ordinary settings, its oblique, heartbreaking epiphanies and careful avoidance of “fine” writing, exposition, emotional analysis and overt drama.

Carver was a modest man but an outstanding short-story writer: for him less was more. His prose reminds us at different times of Hemingway, Kafka and Chekhov, while remaining very much his own. Unlike some of his followers, he was no minimalist. However, his range was too narrow to offer a standard for contemporary writing. Thanks to the Carver-like aesthetic that suffuses this volume, Ford leaves out mandarin stylists like Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer and Cynthia Ozick, unassiminable individuals like Bellow, Philip Roth, J. F. Powers, and I. B. Singer, metafictionists like John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, and a sizeable band of black and women writers whose absence gives the book its strongly masculine and middle-American cast.

As if to cover his flank, Ford puts in a few quite different stories by ethnic women, such as Amy Tan, Gayl Jones and Jamaica Kincaid. He could have done with more of them, not for political reasons but because of the vitality and variety they bring. A third of Ford's forty-one writers are women, but several (including Jayne Anne Phillips, Mary Robison, and Joy Williams) are minimalists whose truncated fictions make little impact here.

The Carver element in Ford's sensibility is reflected in the significant place he gives here to Southern writing; not only Welty, O'Connor and Robert Penn Warren, but more recent fiction by Peter Taylor and Barry Hannah. (Ford himself was born in Mississippi.) Unlike his Southern colleagues, there is nothing at all Faulknerian about Taylor. His characters belong to the educated middle class, and his style is elegant, discursive and conversational. Set in the 1930s, Taylor's “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time” is an evocative memory fable, almost Wordsworthian, a coming-of-age story in which the narrator recalls the old rituals and social oddities in a small, forgotten corner of Tennessee before the war. But what makes the story remarkable is the sound of Taylor's voice over some twenty-six pages, distancing us with its gracious formality yet spinning a slight yarn that sounds strangely intimate.

A fastidious writer like Taylor might seem remote from the American vernacular tradition that links Carver's works to writers as different as Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, Hemingway and J. D. Salinger. But first-person stories, written to be read aloud—a tradition with strong Southern roots—make up the spine of this collection. Ford praises Frank O'Connor's study of the short story, The Lonely Voice (1962), though he doesn't cite his remark about his own difficulties: “Generations of skilful stylists from Chekhov to Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce had so fashioned the short story that it no longer rang with the tone of a man's voice speaking.” O'Connor pays tribute to Russian and American storytellers for holding art at bay and keeping up the oral and physical density of short fiction. The “lonely voice”, of course, is just what we hear in Carver and Ford's own stories, and it accounts for many of the strongest pieces here. J. D. Salinger would not permit the reprinting of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (a story nearly all dialogue), but Ford includes Jean Stafford's Dickensian “In the Zoo”; James Alan McPherson's gifted impersonation of a black railway waiter, “A Solo Song: For Doc”; T. Coraghessan Boyle's raucous memory of adolescence, “Greasy Lake”, Max Apple's delicate, Chekhovian “Bridging”; Leonard Michaels's knotty, surreal “City Boy”; Barry Hannah's explosively vivid “Testimony of Pilot”; Stanley Elkin's raw, pugnacious “A Poetics for Bullies”; William Kotzwinkle's put-on of a punk monologue, “Fugue in A Minor”; and Amy Tan's touching recapitulation of her mother's life and stories in “The Joy Luck Club”.

Like “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time”, these are first-person stories about coping or growing up, all strongly oral, even musical in their prose rhythms. Some begin as if shot out of a cannon. Here is Elkin's speaker:

I'm Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies, dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and kids who pass pencils and water the plants—and cripples, especially cripples. I love nobody loved.

There's a vocal suppleness even in the book's best piece of metafiction, Donald Barthelme's “The Indian Uprising”, a litany of purely verbal effects and mock-melodramatic story fragments. Here words become like rounded physical presences. “Other people”, one character remarks, “run to conceits of wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word.” In Barthelme's healing fantasy, “strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole”.

The same technique of litany shapes what is perhaps the best story in the book, Tim O'Brien's meditation on the Vietnam war. “The Things They Carried”, a profoundly original set of riffs and variations on the title phrase. Ford's emphasis on voice, on demotic language and emphatic or syncopated rhythm, also accounts for some less fortunate choices, including the offbeat, whimsical stories by Grace Paley and John Cheever that don't show these writers at their best. And it helps to explain some of Ford's exclusions. For all his mistrust of ethnic categories, his choice of Elkin, Apple, Paley and Michaels over Bellow, Roth, or Ozick is surely a revisionist view of Jewish-American writing. The same is true of the space and prominence he gives to Peter Taylor and Barry Hannah as Southerners or McPherson and Gayl Jones as black writers. Their stories feel spoken rather than written, casual and conversational instead of literary.

These are choices consistent with Ford's own practice as a writer, stressing a fiction of voice and recollection, over a fiction of ideas, descriptive atmosphere, social narration or dramatic encounter. The Granta Book of the American Short Story, full of expressive writing, testifies to the current strength of this kind of reduced but obliquely suggestive neo-realism. But there is also much that the book puts aside, from previous decades and from the cultural ferment of the present.