Sizing up the big-shot shorts

SHORTLIST:Literary heavyweights and newcomers alike are competing for this year's Frank O'Connor short-story award, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY

NOVELISTS ASPIRE to write the great novel and readers dream of reading it. Somehow perfection never enters the equation – it doesn’t have to. But the short story is different; it is the defining test of narrative, exacting and precise. It is the point at which the storyteller becomes the artist. Many writers agree that a long novel is neither as demanding nor as exposing to attempt as is a short story. A novel can avail of tricks, and very often tricks are needed. Stories demand purity and have little time to indulge in trickery. Perhaps it is true to say that writing a short story is very like attempting to play a Bach solo piece. Unless the performance is very good indeed, the cracks will show.

Frank O'Connor knew all about great short stories. He wrote a few of them, and Guests of the Nation(1931) is an acknowledged masterpiece. When the city of Cork decided to inaugurate a literary award in his honour, it was not only a celebration of a great native son but also a fine gesture towards a wonderful art form: John Cheever, John Updike, William Trevor and Richard Ford have all written novels that will endure, and they have all written great short stories. Joyceans may well agree that for all the ingenuity and wit of Ulyssesand Finnegans Wake, the reputation of James Joyce as an artist may well rest on the sublime perfection of The Dead.

The inaugural Frank O'Connor International Short Story award, in 2005, was won by the Beijing-born, US-based Yiyun Li for her first book, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, from a strong short list. It included two very good collections from US writers: Bret Anthony Johnston's Corpus Christi, with its echoes of Ford, and the singular David Means, with The Secret Goldfish. In 2008, when I was privileged to be a judge, Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earthtowered above the opposition to prove a worthy winner, while last year the award panel did a major service to literature by selecting the American writer Ron Rash's outstanding collection Burning Bright. A quick glance at this year's shortlist is a conclusive endorsement of the prize.

The presence of Yiyun Li may initially cause one to stop and wonder. But the fact is that she won the prize with a good collection, and she has again been shortlisted – this time with a superior, possibly great book, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Yiyun Li could win the prize on the strength of the opening story, a near-novella, Kindness. In between, she published an extraordinary first novel, The Vagrants(2009). It was shortlisted for this year's International Impac Dublin Literary Award, for which she appeared the most obvious challenger to her mentor, William Trevor, but the prize was instead won by Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. But the point should be made that anyone who had read Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayerswould have expected such a powerful novel. Now she has followed The Vagrantswith a brilliant collection, a book good enough to withstand the claims of Edna O'Brien's urgent and visceral voice in Saints and Sinners, in which she reiterates her grasp of the Irish sensibility.

Invariably courageous, O'Brien never makes fiction easy for anyone, least of all herself. In Two Mothersshe peels to the bone the narrator's painful analysis of her evolving relationship with her mother: "She was the hub of the house, the rooms took on a life when she was in them and a death when she was absent."

It is a story shaped by raw emotion and candour: “Then came years and years of correspondence from her. She who professed disgust at the written word wrote daily, bulletins that ranged from the pleading to the poetic, the philosophic, the commonplace. I never fully read them, being afraid of some greater accusation, and my replies were little niceties, squeezed in with bribes and money to stave off confrontation. Yet there was something that I wanted to ask her about. I sensed the secret inside her . . . For 20-odd years I had postponed opening the bundle of letters that lay in my house, in a leather trunk, enjoinders that I had not read and had not the heart to destroy . . . Her letters were deeper, sadder than I had remembered, but what struck me most was their hunger and their thirst. Here was a woman desperately trying to explain herself and to be understood.”

Colm Tóibín has been shortlisted for his second volume of stories, The Empty Family. Leave-taking and return are dominate themes in a collection shaped by memory and the influence of Maeve Brennan. In Two Women, a movie-set designer returns to an Ireland she left long before: "What surprised her now was the speed with which she had resolved, on arrival at Dublin Airport, that she would never come here again, that this would be her last visit . . . As she was driven across the city towards her hotel, she felt that she was travelling through alien territory, low, miserable and grim. As long as she was open to such mood swings she thought, then she must not be old."

Canada is represented by Alexander MacLeod, one of the two new writers on the list. Light Liftingarticulates the speed and aggression of today; Miracle Milelooks at the experience of one of the most marginalised elements in any society, the international professional athlete. This is a tough, uncompromising body of work that may not appeal to everyone. He is a son of one of Canada's finest storytellers, Alistair MacLeod, yet these edgy narratives could not be more different and are tied to character, not place.

Also heavily reliant on speech as spoken is the other newcomer, Suzanne Rivecca's Death Is Not an Option, a collection that will divide opinion – or, put more bluntly, will either beguile or alienate. At the centre of these overly sharp little stories of snappy teen dialogue sounding very close to television scripts are loneliness, despair and the need to present a carefully constructed face to meet all comers. The situations are believable but the execution is not all that convincing.

Marry or Burnis a large-hearted, utterly human collection of life-experienced narratives so full that it is difficult to read more than one consecutively. Valerie Trueblood, author of a novel, Seven Loves, brings intuition, generous detail and sharp observation to her narratives. In Suitors, the parents of Meg decide to go along with her plan to allow a friend who dabbles in matchmaking find her a partner. "In college she [Meg] did well and had boyfriends, one of them serious, but in the next 10 or 12 years the men had dried up. Now she was at that stage between the good ones all being taken and the return of those same men, divorced, like salmon coming back up the river."

It is rich fare; a great deal goes on in several of these stories. In She Had Coarsened, the bemused narrator recalls her dear dead Uncle Randall, who had once, at a party, discouraged a drunk making advances on his wife with an immaculately delivered warning shot: "Now, your people, sir, must be wondering where you've gotten to . . . ".

Last year's winner, Ron Rash, has more than raised the bar: his collection showcased the US short story as well as the award. It does no disservice to Yiyun Li to suggest that the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award has been good to her. She has proved herself with a powerful novel and with this assured second collection, in which she thanks William Trevor. Kindness, in which a middle-aged woman hears of a death that causes her to revisit her solitary youth and the only love story she ever knew – one she observed from a distance – is one of the most profound stories I have ever read. Lightning may well strike twice. Gold Boy, Emerald Girlstands out on this shortlist. Should it win, it will be a victory for everyone: the author, the short-story form, the judges, the award, literary prizes in general and – oh yes, let us not forget, the real winners – us, the readers.

The winner of the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award will be announced on September 18th