Short stories are full of depth

"THIS IS NOT CHICK LIT: ORIGINAL STORIES BY AMERICA'S BEST WOMEN WRITERS," edited by Elizabeth Merrick, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 313 pages, $13.95

Before you get to the lush and elegantly crafted stories in "This is Not Chick Lit," you do feel compelled to read the introduction. There, the editor, Elizabeth Merrick, explains the title.

"Chick lit is a genre, like the thriller, the sci-fi novel, or the fantasy epic. Its form and content are, more or less, formulaic: White girl in the big city searches for Prince Charming, all the while shopping, alternately cheating on or adhering to her diet, dodging her boss, and enjoying the occasional teary-eyed lunch with her token Sassy Gay Friend. Chick lit is the daughter of the romance novel and the step-sister to the fashion magazine. ...

"The problem is that the chick lit deluge has helped to obscure the literary fiction being written by some of our country's most gifted women — many of whom you've never even heard of."

Merrick is correct. She presents 18 marvelous stories; I was familiar with three of the authors.

Roxana Robinson's story, "Embrace," is the most marvelous of all — a perfect love story. It begins in shame and moves to anger and despair, and then to an ending one could hardly call happy, but which is somehow redemptive. In between the anger and the end, the couple has some good years. Robinson describes those like this:

"They have been married for nearly a quarter of a century, and they have stopped fighting. Something between them has steadied, and they no longer frighten each other. Instead, they trust each other. She is less intemperate, and when he gets annoyed, she finds his exasperation amusing. She waits it out, smiling, and smooths his hair. He finds her exaggerations funny; she no longer infuriates him."

There are also stories of small lives. Mary Gordon writes of a woman who daily visits a library she doesn't much like. Caitlin Macey describes a woman who gets a cleaning lady. Lynne Tillman writes of a man who teaches in the high school he attended.

There is no Prince Charming for any of these characters. Shopping doesn't cure what ails them.

You come away from this collection thinking Merrick was perhaps unfair to compare these short stories, dense with significance as they are, to any genre of long fiction. It may be that any novel — not just "chick lit," but any novel — would seem light and silly in comparison.

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E-mail: susan@desnews.com

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