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by Seth Rogovoy
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., June 29, 1996 -- Summer's here, and the time is right for dancin' in the streets, according to the old Motown hit. But as far as magazines are concerned, the time is right for reading fiction. Something about being on vacation or lying in the sun at the beach, apparently, is supposed to make readers yearn for short stories, perhaps more than they do ordinarily. Whatever. We'll take what we can get.
The summer issue of the English quarterly Granta boldly heralds "The Best of Young American Novelists" on its cover. Inside, the literary journal presents works by 20 writers under 40, chosen in an elaborate, four-step process that winnowed over 200 contenders down to 52 nominees, before a four-judge panel selected the final 20.
The whole process has been the object of some controversy, which editor Ian Jack alludes to in an introduction. The magazine has been accused of grossly overlooking some obvious choices, such as Donna Tartt, William T. Vollmann, Bret Easton Ellis and David Foster Wallace, none of whom were even nominated. It has been criticized for bending over backwards to select a multi-colored crew of authors for the sake of political correctness, and attacked for not naming enough authors of color. It has been lambasted for using the contest more to hype the magazine than to honor the writers, and condemned for the basic notion of pitting writers against writers in a spurious competition.
Given all these criticisms, in the end, readers are presented with a survey -- definitive or not -- of some of the best new fiction writers in America, including David Guterson, Ethan Canin, Lorrie Moore and Mona Simpson. The excerpt by Canin -- who when he's not writing fiction practices medicine -- is a sympathetic, genteel portrait of the culture shock a Midwestern boy experiences upon arriving at Columbia University in the '70s. Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Speed of Sperm," in sharp contrast, is a riotously funny, first-person narration by a hermaphrodite. A clever excerpt from an upcoming novel by Stewart O'Nan takes the form of a letter to mystery writer Stephen King (he's never named, but his books and movies are), whose role in the book -- it concerns him buying the rights to a death-row inmate's story -- is apparently the subject of a non-fictional legal battle.
Almost as revealing as the stories themselves are the self-consciously literary, photographic portraits of the writers by Marion Ettlinger. The summer issue of Granta is one you'll want to savor throughout the summer months.
In any case, it's quality, not quantity, and the New Yorker opts for star quality, with original works of fiction by Martin Amis, Robert Stone, Geoffrey O'Brien and Cynthia Ozick. Amis's story is vintage Amis, plunging the reader into a violent narrative of blue-collar, class- and race-conscious London at the millenium. By contrast, Ozick's is a sort of mystery on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where a perestroika-era Soviet emigre on a whirlwind visit is misjudged by everyone she meets.
There's not a slacker amongst them; fiction editor Bill Buford, who up until last year edited Granta, has apparently ceded that territory to his successor.
The rest of the issue is filled out by essays, memoirs, and letters, from authors including Salman Rushdie, Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and Gore Vidal. Rushdie's is as eloquent a defense of the novel, that perennial subject of the premature obituary, as you are likely to read anywhere.
The issue contains lots of good reading by well-established writers, but someone ought to send Buford a copy of the new Granta, to remind him of the added pleasures that come from discovering new voices.
The Weekly Standard has been around for about a year now, enough time for it to have worked out whatever kinks it faced early on and to have established a voice and identity for itself.
A journal of political commentary (stop smirking "Just what we needed"), a quick look at the masthead gives an indication of where the opinions are coming from. The editor and publisher is William Kristol, formerly known as Dan Quayle's brain; the executive editor is Fred Barnes, the former house conservative at the New Republic; the deputy editor is John Podhoretz, son of Norman, the former editor of Commentary and neo- conservative icon.
As one might expect, there is a lot of whining about Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Weekly Standard. There's a lot of crankier stuff, too. Must-to-avoids are Fred Barnes's embarassingly personal testimony of the overpoweringly positive influence his father had upon his life and spirituality ("My Father's Day" July 1), and a parody of an op-ed piece by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman which would be offensive if it weren't so sophomoric ("Bibikampf," June 17).
The Weekly Standard is not wholly without merit, however. In fact, within its pages is being played out a fascinating fratricidal battle among Republicans. While their antipathy for Clinton goes unremarked, it seems Kristol and company are no great fans of Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole either. They trumpet "Dole's Abortion Blunder" in the lead editorial of June 24. In the July 1 issue, they take him to task for his tobacco fiasco in "Smoking Out Bob Dole," in which author Matthew Rees writes, "the fact that it takes a tobacco company to alert Dole and his fellow Republicans to the need for a tougher stance on tobacco is the best evidence of all that their political antennae are badly out of whack."
Not everyone was thrilled when Germany was reunited in 1989. Some remembered that the nation was purposely split in half in 1945 as a sort of insurance policy against what was an annoying tendency on its part to invade neighbors and start world wars. Some thought that reuniting the country would only reopen doors best left shut.
According to Hans Konig, writing in "Germania Irredenta" in the July issue of the Atlantic Monthly, history is repeating itself in a foreboding manner. Once again, there are stirrings within Germany over the so-called Sudetenland that frighteningly resemble those of the late- '30s, when Germany occupied the border region of Czechoslovakia on the pretext of protecting the area's German minority.
German refugees from those lands are now suing in Czech courts for restitution of their property, and the German government has piped in with political support for their claims, which effectively would overturn provisions of the postwar Potsdam Declaration.
"A shiver must have gone through Germany's neighbors at this argument, which questions the very foundation of their states," writes Konig, who on a trip to Germany, finds evidence not only of a growing longing for the Sudetenland, but for the spread of a German empire into Poland and Russia.
Also in the July issue, travel writer Deborah Fallows surveys four "premier" U.S. health spas, one of which is the Berkshires' own Canyon Ranch in Lenox, which she terms the "Jaguar" of the spa world. As for me, I'm looking for a Saab.
----------------- To subscribe for one year:
Weekly Standard: Box 96153, Washington, DC 20090-6153, or 1-800-983- 7600; $80
Atlantic Monthly: Box 51044, Boulder, CO 80321, or 1-800-234-2411; $18 Granta: Box 420387, Palm Coast, FL 32142-9912, $32 (4 issues)
The New Yorker: Box 52312, Boulder, CO 80323, or 1-800-825-2510; $39.95
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