This collection has been several weeks in the reading, at scattered intervals (the number of books I have on the go is becoming unmanageable again), but tonight I read the last of the stories within it that I intend to. I'd picked it up in the first place because Donna Tartt was one of the contributors - the story, "Sleepytown", is a sombre, haunted meditation which has more in common with The Little Friend (at the time still unwritten) than The Secret History and is very good. As to the others, only Charles D'Ambrosio's "Her Real Name" and William T Vollmann's "The Blue Wallet" particularly appealed to me; I admired Eugenides' "Capricious Gardens" but, as usual with his writing, didn't particularly enjoy it, and the DFW story included, "Forever Overhead", is the only piece of his that I've read in the past and actually liked somewhat (though it still left - and leaves - me a bit cold).
McInerney (whose fiction I've never read) selected the stories with the usual composite of aims in mind - a sort of 'state of the nation' sampling with appropriate nods to diversity which also included the 'best' recent short fiction (though he doesn't put it quite like that in his rather good introduction and editor's note to the collection). I found a lot of the selections to be simply boring - unpleasant and/or unengaging, and dealing with various strata of society which the authors obviously knew well but which hold no interest for me. I'm not sure if perhaps I'm growing more narrow-minded (or, to put a better construction on it, specialised) in my literary tastes...but then again, when did I ever enjoy this kind of gritty, true-to-life type fiction? More of a dreamer, I.
