Virgin Fiction 2

neuwertig, nur leichte Gebrauchsspuren

The sequel to the Weisbach editors' first anthology (1998) follows the same format as before, compiling short fiction by unpublished authors under age 35. It's always interesting to watch fledglings test their wings, even if such attempts all look more or less alike. The writers here are, like most beginners, somewhat tentative, and much of their work is sketchy in the extreme: ''Home at Last,'' for example, is more a portrait than a story, describing the difficult recovery of a man whos left a mental institution and moved in with his brother's family until ''he gets back on his feet.'' ''Youthful Offenders'' is a long depiction of a young tennis player whose competition with his archrival reaches a kind of natural climax when he sleeps with him. ''Behind Sharp Branches'' offers a rather stale recollection of a Catholic childhood (''There are two types of people in the Catholic school worldview: sinners and saints'') in which a boy's mistreatment of his black classmate provokes his first insight into the nature of suffering and shame, while ''Midnight Trash'' takes us into the febrile fantasies of a middle-aged suburban husband who longs for a roll on the lawn with his next-door neighbor's wife. There are also plenty of failed-love stories, such as ''The Psychologist (Who Doesn't Love Me)'' (a doomed affair with a womanizing shrink) and ''Fifth Grade: A Criminal History'' (a schoolteacher falls in love with an ex- con). And then theres the familiar innocents-abroad tale: ''Tourist Trap'' portrays a group of young people working in a cheesy natural-history museum in Alaska whose customers get more than they bargained for from the polar-bear exhibit. Fresh and good-natured to a fault, but disappointing overall. Most of the stories here avoid the cheap cynicism endemic in writing programs todaybut they still need a lot more meat on their sinews. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Fiction