Anthology is an excellent way to pass the time

July 27, 2004|Book Review, Globe Correspondent

The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms, By the Paris Review, Picador, 400 pp., $15

I road-tested the new themed anthology of work that had appeared in The Paris Review. With a book titled "The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms," it seemed the only thing to do. The anthology's unique organizing premise divides its contents into reads that are appropriately timed for plane, train, or elevator rides and waiting-room sits. Despite the originality of the concept, I found myself ignoring these distinctions as I hugged the book like an emergency-room patient's teddy bear (or any other good book) through airports, motel rooms, and doctor's offices and curled up with it on beds and couches.

I'm happy to report this time-managed anthology works just fine as a conventional start-to-finish reading experience for the usual reason -- the excellence of its pages. Founded in 1953, The Paris Review is one of the best lit mags ever published; Picador, the anthology's publisher, had a treasure chest of quality work to choose from. The contents are an embarrassment of A-level literary riches, including work by Denis Johnson, Edward Jones, Alice Munroe, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Robert Pinksy. (These are the first names that occurred to me in a sentence that could go on three times as long.) If you're a reader of contemporary fiction or poetry, there are almost certainly names here that say "writer" to you.

While Billy Collins's sublimely satisfying poem "Turning Ten" rides to the top of the "Elevators" section -- you'll probably miss your floor, but not care -- I looked forward to the slow unfolding of the longer "Waiting Rooms" fiction. Rick Moody's dissection of the twin towers of modern life, marriage and career, and the weird intersection between them in the wedding staging business ("The Mansion on the Hill") makes you thankful for your own day job, however humble. This story also offers the disquieting image of the chicken mask that Moody's down-and-out business-school grad wears to hustle for the fast-fowl purveyor Hot Bird.