THE WEDDING CAKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD

National Public Radio personality Stamberg, along with novelist Garrett, got the bright idea to have 23 writers—Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Madison Smartt Bell, Stuart Dybek, and a host of others—work independently of each other on a story that incorporates the title image. The resulting anthology—some of these stories were first read on NPR—is more a novelty item than a worthy dive into contemporary fiction. Dybek's ``I Never Told This to Anyone'' is a touching fabulism about ``a little bride and groom'' who ``would come to visit me at night,'' though it's more self-conscious and mannered than Dybek's better work; Charles Baxter's ``Possum'' is an amusing dialogue story, mostly between a sister and her younger brother; Kelly Cherry's title story is a delicate but all-too-brief prose poem; Bausch's ``Tandolfo, the Great,'' about a clown who loses his cool at a birthday party for a five-year-old, is clever but forced; Beattie's ``Picture Perfect'' is a slight present-tense account that combines Virginia Woolfian lyricism and some notes (one character is a photographer) on perspective. The three most affecting tales—in their own right, not as variations on a theme- -are Al Young's ``The Subliminal Cakewalk Breakdown,'' in which a narrator, forced to leave the California freeway, breaks down at a zany, surreal truck-stop and becomes involved in the lives he finds there; Bell's ``Pawnshop,'' about a narrator at said pawnshop who must deal with a junkie friend and with his own conscience; and Mary Lee Settle's ``Dogs,'' an evocative southern reminiscence. Stamberg tells us she came to this idea after having writers concoct first a chain novel and then a chain mystery. Such ideas make sense to fill air time, but aren't particularly worth memorializing in a gimmicky book like this.