The roads sometimes travelled

The Dead Fish Museum, Charles D'Ambrosio Text, $39

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, Maile Meloy, Text/Penguin, $32.

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THE GOLDEN age of the American short story can be said to have occurred during the post-war era when John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, Richard Yates, Norman Mailer and, of course, JD Salinger published their first works in such seminal literary publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, The Atlantic, The Paris Review and Harper's.

America was uncomfortably settling into its role as a nuclear superpower, riveted by the revelations of Joseph McCarthy's Un-American Activities committee, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Beats, rock 'n roll, racial genocide and the bomb. Such fertile territory seemed impossible to replicate and many of those great literary magazines have since faded to oblivion, others no longer regularly publish short fiction. Yet a recent explosion of literary quarterlies and online journals have heralded a renaissance of this classic American form.

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy and Charles D'Ambrosio's The Dead Fish Museum are examples of contemporary American short story collections by young writers working at the height of their powers. The great American short story is dead; long live the American short story.

Meloy's early novel Liars And Saints propelled her to literary prominence. Full disclosure. I disliked it as much as I admire this collection for exactly the same reasons. Her unadorned, streamlined style seemed too sparse for the generational ambition of her early novel. By creating characters and situations with minimal brushstrokes, that saga read as if it was composed of structural outlines waiting to be filled in. However, the brevity of the short story demands concision and sparse suggestion and seems the perfect template for Meloy's ample literary gifts.

In Both Ways, Meloy fulfils the expectation of her AR Ammons epitaph: "One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it." Her characters are often caught at a crossroads in the headlights of their own indecision. Having to make choices, they are often led by fate to the way they do not want, or the losses fated by their pursued desires.

In Travis B., the hero is a lonely Montana ranch hand deformed by childhood polio. One evening in search of company, he accidentally stumbles on an evening class on education law. The teacher is a young law school graduate who drives nine hours to and from the small town of Glendive, and the young ranch hand reaches out to her, stirred by unexpected longing. He knows their relationship is impossible, yet he pursues her to the point where he brings his horse to town to take her for a ride to the local diner. "She seemed to fit his body like a puzzle piece. He rode slowly back to the school parking lot, not wanting to let her go."

In Red from Green, an adolescent girl is taking her last rafting trip with her father and uncle before going east to boarding school. Her uncle, a litigator of class action suits, has brought along a young man who is the key witness against a chemical company whose workers have suffered neurological damage by repetitive handling of organic solvents. One night after her father and uncle have gone to sleep in their tent, the young girl is seduced by the young man. Though immature, she is aroused, disturbed and ultimately haunted by her own guilty desire.

Unlike Meloy, D'Ambrosio is an elaborationist. His stories are epic explorations of the lost, the depressed, the deceived, the marginalised – individuals scarred by dreams deferred and disastrous disappointments. His characters are often relics – like Drummond, the hero of Drummond and Son, who repairs typewriters for a living. "As far back as Drummond could recall, he'd had typewriter parts in his pockets and ink in the crevices of his fingers and Remington gun oil on his skin." Drummond's son is intellectually and physically handicapped, a religious savant whose mother has abandoned him to his father. Yet the regularity and pride of work mark Drummond's days and keep his spirits buoyant and his love for his son fervent and alive.

In Screenwriter, a successful Hollywood filmmaker meets a beautiful failed ballerina in the loony bin. She asks him for a cigarette, and then employs it to set herself on fire. Rather than retreating in horror, the screenwriter, mollified by medication, discovers a demonic rapture. "She was a mess, ghoulish with a plastering of soot and ash. Her body, crisscrossed with brandings and burned by match heads, looked fully clothed."

In The Dead Fish Museum, the protagonist Ramage, recently released from some kind of prison, finds his way back into the world by living in a dive motel in North New Jersey while working as a head carpenter on the set of a non-union erotic movie whose actors and crew are all marginalised by their invisibility. Struggling to find their way into the light, they are all as frozen as the catch which fills the refrigerator called The Dead Fish Museum by the wife of Rigo, a refugee from El Salvador, who tries to rediscover his childhood joy by fishing in the dirty, polluted waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

D'Ambrosio and Meloy explore the paradoxes and promises of worlds tainted by impossible expectations, overpowering desire and lack of will. While their styles are wildly dissimilar, their stories evoke similarly empathetic characters struggling with the very contemporary problems of anomie, loss and grief. Perhaps the post-war dilemmas which inspired the golden age of American fiction have remained with us after all; lying dormant, waiting to be moulded by the next generation of contemporary masters.

Cheryl Sucher is an American-born author and reviewer living in Hawke's Bay.

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