'Best American Short Stories 1996' Is, As Usual, A Mixed Bag. By Piers Marchant BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 1996. Edited by John Edgar Wideman. Houghton Mifflin Co. Paperback, $12.95 IN HER FOREWORD to Best American Short Stories 1996, series editor Katrina Kenison quotes Joyce Carol Oates' description of a literary journal as being "A symposium. A gathering. A party." This is, of course, appropriate for Kenison's own laborious effort. Any good party is going to be a mixture of old reliables and new X-factors. The thing that makes the Best American series compelling year in and year out is, oddly enough, its inconsistency. Each year a new guest editor works with Kenison in selecting the 20 or so stories that make up the collection. Certain collections, then, have become literary landmarks--take for example Raymond Carver's 1986 collection, which, among other things, debuted Mona Simpson and Ethan Canin--while others have left us more confused and wincing (Tobias Wolff's remains an unaccountable disappointment). Each collection is stamped indelibly by the guest editor, which alternates male and female each year. Under each editor's watchful eye, some collections stick more to the known and established (Richard Ford's 1990 collection had not one but two stories by Richard Bausch), others veer off into more uncharted and tangled territory. This year's collection is a mixed bag. Edited by novelist John Edgar Wideman, it impressively avoids a lot of the old stand-bys and seems more willing to take chances. Unfortunately, Wideman's risk-taking doesn't often pay off. There are exceptions, however. Interestingly, one of the high points is newcomer Junot Diaz's "Ysrael," a story about two brothers on vacation in Santo Domingo. Diaz, who received a luminous amount of attention for his first collection, Drown, released earlier last year, manages to maintain an edgy, violent tone even while writing about the banality of day-to-day activity the narrator and his brother endure, as in this description of his brother's reaction to the land around them: "He stood on the patio in his shorts and looked out over the mountains, at the mists that gathered like water, at the brucal trees that blazed like fires on the hogbacks. This, he said, is shit." Other highlights include Mary Gordon's "Intertextuality," an imagining narrative as a woman tries to place her grandmother in a context she may or may not have been comfortable in. It reads quickly, like the Diaz story, a simple, straightforward pleasure. Peter Ho Davies "The Silver Screen," on the other hand, is completely the opposite, a story so bursting with ideas and different narratives that it buzzes from one character to the next like a mosquito in a blood bank. It's a story about the upsurge of communist support in post-war Malaysia; but in a few pages it also manages to touch on cinema, art, loyalty, success, and the last resorts of a dying movement. Davies writes in his contributor notes that he had the idea for the story for many years, but was afraid to actually sit down and attempt it, until one morning it just burst out of him in a single sitting. We should all be so lucky. Mixed with these gems, however, are assorted lesser lights. The worst offender might be Stephen Dixon's "Sleep," a long, addled take on a husband's dealing with the loss of his wife. Self-conscious and dragging, the story sticks in your throat like a cross-ways potato chip; you just want it to go down. There are misses by big names (Robert Olen Butler's horrifically whimsical "Jealous Husband Returns In Form Of Parrot," or Stuart Dybek's puzzling "Paper Lantern") and misses by relative unknowns (Angela Patrinos' slight "Sculpture I," or David Huddle's unconvincing "Past My Future"). You can't fault a man for taking chances, and the exposure of young writers is always good for the literary community. You get the sense that Wideman was open to anything that struck his fancy. One just wishes his fancy had slightly more to offer. As with each edition, there is also a section in the back listing the other top 100 stories considered for the collection. There, one finds such missing notables as Mary Gaitskill, Charles Baxter and Ron Carlson and wonders why they weren't included. The joy of the Best American series is in these arguments. Art is, of course, the most subjective of all passions. The choices one writer makes of his or her peers is a compelling and pervasive insight into the particulars of the creative mind. BASS 1996 is hardly visionary, but it offers glimpses and snatches of brilliance.

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