THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 1987

Beattie writes a serviceable and (for a change in this series) unjadedly enthusiastic introduction to the choices she's made—and, once more, the picker says a good deal about the picked: many stories here trade in the centripetal shagginess of detail yet narrow narrative lurch that mark so many of Beattie's own works. Hardly a story is pointed or sharpened: they have broad, even bottoms that work best with comedy (Ralph Lombreglia's "Men Under Water") and worst with melodrama (Kent Haruf's "Private Debts/Public Holdings"). Susan Sontag's impressively urgent, breath-held portrait of trying to live around the AIDS plague is a good piece of stylization, as is Mavis Gallant's funny, resigned comedy of cultural ruin, "Kingdom Come." The two most superficially involving stories are Sue Miller's "The Lover of Women"—a calm, year-by-year sexual dance that owes a lot (too much) to numerous stories by Peter Taylor; and Craig Nova's "The Prince"—with that signature Nova imprint of classical tale-telling and gargantuan pretention. The winner here, hands down, is Bharati Mukhergee's "The Tenant"—a story deceptively simple and inevitable (a young Indian woman's exile in the Midwest; hungers that can be appeased) that has no trace of the disingenuousness of so many others here: a strong, bouyant piece of work. Included this year, by the way, in the contributor's notes, is an opportunity for each writer to talk about the genesis of his or her story—a sophomoric, writing-workshop idea that adds nothing to the stories at all.