Still, it’s worth noting that few critics took issue with the stories themselves. As the new anthology “20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker’’ attests, the pieces that actually ran in the magazine are uniformly excellent. They represent a range of styles and experiences, as might be expected from a group of authors this diverse. (Ten of the 20 selected are women, more than a third are foreign born.)
Understandably, several stories deal with the reverberations of immigration, the most compelling being Nell Freudenberger’s “An Arranged Marriage,” which recounts the meeting and courtship — first online, then in person — of a young Indian woman and an older American. Freudenberger’s prose is direct, precise, and quietly thrilling. Her heroine, Amina, represents an entire population whose ambitions require them to withstand the complex tolls of cultural dislocation.
The two funniest stories of the batch deal with the disastrous allure of Hollywood, which can hardly be a coincidence given the long shadow the film industry casts over a pursuit as esoteric, and unprofitable, as literary fiction.
In Joshua Ferris’s uproarious “The Pilot,” a fragile screenwriter, faced with the prospect of attending a party a few notches above his station, falls hard off the wagon. Ferris captures the bumbling cogitation of his hero with brutal precision but never holds his hero up for contempt. On the contrary, his neurotic rituals around e-mail protocol, wardrobe selection, and social interaction are painfully recognizable. The story’s final scene is a shocking marriage of the comic and tragic, a climax that masterfully captures the fate of the weak in the sunny jungles of narcissism.
Rivka Galchen’s “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered with Fire” doesn’t quite deliver the same narrative punch. But it’s a delightfully wry story. Trish, a pregnant novelist who has sold her first book to Hollywood, has just been abandoned by her husband — who was documenting his marital gripes on a blog called I Can’t Stand My Wife.
