Storytelling Superb In ‘Nothing But You’

“Nothing But You: Love Stories from The New Yorker” edited by Roger Angell (Random House, 471 pages, $25.95)

In his introduction to “Nothing But You: Love Stories from The New Yorker,” editor Roger Angell writes:

“Reading the stories in this book will make many of us wish to fall in love again, but just as often, I think, it will be quite the other way.”

He got that right. On the love front, this is a collection of very weird stories. An early hint comes from the Anton Chekhov quote (the story’s not in the book, by the way) that provides the title:

“All this time I have been thinking of nothing but you. I live only in the thought of you. I wanted to forget, to forget you; but why, oh, why have you come?”

If you look hard, you’ll find one sentimental first-kiss story. More typical are the “missed chances, changes of heart … and enduring silences,” as Angell - a New Yorker fiction editor since 1956 - puts it.

“Nothing But You ” includes Alice Elliott Dark’s “In the Gloaming” (now a made-for-TV-movie) about a mother’s evening conversations with her dying son. Ann Beattie’s “The Cinderella Waltz” is a complicated tangle of an ex-wife, a young daughter and a lover who prefer each other to the man who links them. John O’Hara’s country club belle in “How Old, How Young” is found “walking like a drunken tart … weeping without any self-restraint and leaving her misery naked for people to stare at.”

Right about now you’re probably saying to yourself, “These are love stories?” Certainly “Nothing But You” offers a curious definition of love. But if you can forget romantic expectations, the storytelling is superb.

For outrageous humor, try “Dating Your Mom,” the Ian Frazier classic: “After several months we started getting into some different things, like the big motorized stroller. The thrill I felt the first time Mom steered me down the street! On the tray, in addition to my Big Jim doll and the wire with the colored wooden beads, I have my desk blotter, my typewriter, an in-out basket, and my name plate. I get a lot of work done, plus I get a great chance to people-watch.”

Or Woody Allen’s sublime “The Kugelmass Episode,” in which the unhappily married Kugelmass enjoys illicit afternoons with Emma Bovary, who helpfully speaks “in the same fine English translation as the paperback.”

Then his transporter breaks, leaving Madame Bovary running up quite a bill at New York’s Plaza Hotel and a Stanford professor remarking: “First a strange character named Kugelmass appears, and now she’s gone from the book. Well, I guess the mark of a classic is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something new.”

In “How to Give the Wrong Impression,” Katherine Heiny offers explicit instructions for unrequited love:

“For Christmas, you buy Boris a key chain. This is what you had always imagined you would give a boyfriend someday, a key chain with a key to your apartment. Only it’s not exactly a parallel situation with Boris, of course, in that he’s not your boyfriend and he already has a key to your apartment, because he lives there. O.K., you admit it, there are no parallels other than that you are giving him a key chain.

“Still, you can tell the guy in the jewelry store anything you like. Go ahead, say it: This is for my boyfriend, do you think he’ll like it?”

For the ache of love lost, there’s Alice Munro’s “The Jack Randa Hotel,” although it’s hard to tell who lost more: the husband who ran off to Australia with his much younger student, or the wife he thought he left behind.

And best of all is the exquisite jewel “Yours,” by Mary Robison, which in only two heartbreaking pages teaches that to have a little talent is sometimes worse than having no talent at all.

“Nothing But You” may not be the answer to this summer’s wedding present list, but its selections from the summer of 1964 through 1995 could accurately be subtitled “The Best of The New Yorker.”

Or perhaps, “The 38 Best Short Stories Ever Written.”