So what do New Puritans like? Narrative, "the life force of fiction" is high on the list, as are "textual simplicity," "clarity," "grammatical purity" and "integrity of expression." All New Puritan works are set in the present day because they're "fragments of our time," and they feature only "real" (scare quotes mine) products, places and objects -- nothing made up. "We are all moralists," the manifesto adds ominously, "so all texts feature a recognizable ethical reality."

The 10 tenets of the New Puritans can be sorted into two general categories, the plausible and the just plain silly. Into the latter category goes some pointless chest-beating directed at poetry ("Rule 2: We are prose writers and recognize that prose is the dominant form of expression"); Thorne himself, when I spoke with him on the telephone, shrugged this one off as "provocative -- deliberately so." Also file under silly Rule 7, which specifies that all stories must be dated as to the time of their composition, and Rule 5, the renunciation of the flashback, which is justified in the manifesto by some freshman-dorm musings on the nature of memory ("Memory is an activity and memories cannot exist independently from the process of remembering," and so on).

But the manifesto is also not without some substance. Its brief in favor of plot is welcome: "Rule 1: Primarily Storytellers, we are dedicated to the narrative form." For all the ink that's been spilled about postmodern fiction and its indifference to distinctions between "high" and "low," plot is still tainted by an association with the baser genres, with action movies and soap operas, and it's nice to see somebody speak up for it.

In its emphasis on "simplicity," "purity" and "faithful representations," there's a sense that the New Puritans are trying to do away with what they see as cheap lyricism and pretentious, self-important literary special effects. (Thorne mentions Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Jeanette Winterson as prime targets.) They're trying to see their way past the flash and craft of the workshop to something more urgent.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding, and in fact "All Hail the New Puritans" is quite a good read, all things considered. The stories are brisk, a little lightweight, in places amusing, mostly bittersweet in flavor the way short stories are. They offer virtually no resistance to the reader: no long words, no tricky structural conceits, no difficult chronologies to be puzzled out, nothing too "literary." They aspire to the limpid beauty of a well-turned detective story, minus the crime and minus the detective.

Reading as a reviewer, one looks for key passages to excerpt, but these stories are almost unquotable: There's no voice-over, no lyricism, no load-bearing authorial pronouncements (see Rule 4: "we ... vow to avoid all devices of voice: rhetoric, authorial asides"). No one's talking over the action, telling you what's what and who's who. The English press has accused the New Puritans of being overly influenced by film (James Wood's review in the Guardian ran under the headline "Celluloid Junkies"), and in fact most of these stories could be remade as movies without losing much.

At their best the stories achieve a vital, vivid immediacy. "Skunk," by Geoffrey Dyer ("Paris Trance"), is a gem, a seriocomic account of a guy trying to baby-sit a woman he barely knows, a friend of a friend, through a marijuana freakout on the banks of the Seine. The events acquire the tint of melancholy as the reader realizes that the narrator is in love with the friend in question, who's taken. Blincoe's "Short Guide to Game Theory" is another success, a story about a guy whose job it is to evaluate new ideas for board games for a toy company. When his childhood friend shows up trying to sell him SWING™, a hopelessly bad Monopoly rip-off the object of which is to create and market a pop band, they both learn a thing or two about cheating.

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