The Best Australian Stories 2007 – Drewe’s second as editor – contains a fair swag of ‘I’ stories which create the uncomfortable impression that the writer and the narrator are one and the same. As a rule, the greater the confusion about the authorial voice’s position, the less successful the short story.

Drewe makes it clear in his introduction what he thinks of the Australian media’s enthusiasm for literary scandals involving memoirists as fiction-writers. He jokes about short story writers outing themselves as fabricators: ‘Even though they might seem convincing, they’re not factual.’ Drewe reckons that story writers should confess to a suspicious media: ‘The events described took place mainly in our heads.’ Yes, indeed, but how do you account for the fact that, when a story is unconvincing, when it falters in the strength of its fabrication, if it is also written in the first person, a reader may be led to suspect the opposite: that it is self-confession masquerading as fiction?

If I were asked to point out which stories in this collection I thought had suffered from too much real ‘I’, to the detriment of the writing, I might be tripped up smartly, no doubt accusing the wrong stories of confessional awkwardness. My point is that it is not whether or not writing is true or made up that matters, it is whether the story is true or false within its own parameters. My reason for bringing memoir and confession into this equation is that it may be tougher and may require more skills to avoid writing falsely when your narrative ‘I’ does not convincingly separate from the authorial voice.

J.M. Coetzee’s wonderful new book, Diary of a Bad Year, shows that a seriously good writer can turn the confusion into a feature. There, the reader is tied in knots, as she tries to keep up with the implications of the author-narrator-character relationships inside the text, all the while deliciously but frustratingly aware that the writer is way up ahead, down long corridors so she can never hope to catch up with him.

The length of short stories included in this anthology – some a page long, few exceeding half a dozen pages – makes that kind of bravura performance within the hall of mirrors impossible, but no matter how long the piece of writing, the challenge is not to make the reflected images seem false.

A few of these stories make falseness, if not a virtue, at least a feature. They are, mostly, the ‘I’ stories which display quirkiness (although there are a few notable non-realist stories in the third person), where the narrator’s yearning creates a fantasy story about, for instance, having sex with pop stars, or killing annoying siblings. I am not sure that these stories achieve what Drewe says a good short story must do: to ‘strike a chord with the listener or reader whereby an essence of our own lives is extrapolated’. They are entertainments, exercises in extrapolating a word game from an idea, rather than responses to the question, ‘how shall I live?’, which is what prompts the kind of stories Drewe is talking about.

 Another story which misses that chord is Beth Spencer’s ‘When You Hold Me … (The Bra Monologues)’, which appears to be part of a longer work in progress. In this bold, ambitious first-person story, the narrator is trapped into conditioned roles by the pathos of desire, and flounders in her feminised self as she fails to control or understand her desires. The self-absorbed seriousness of her confession is tedious precisely because of her entrapment. Spencer’s authorial challenge is to find a narrative voice that manages to convey that tedium without being itself tedious. My impatience with this character may be a generational thing, but she does seem, with her fetish of lacy underwear as a way to control her self-loathing, to have an awfully long way to go before she can interest us.

The narrators in stories such as Marion Halligan’s ‘The White Peacock’ and Melissa Beit’s ‘Nothing to Fear’ are much more my cup of tea, flawed and feisty but quick enough to learn within the space of a short story. Halligan’s story succeeds because of its sly but kind humour and its masterful manipulation of point of view. The self-deluded narrator, a schoolteacher who runs from a failed love affair, brings to her rural retreat prejudices that will be delightfully crushed by an unlikely hero. Halligan is an old-fashioned kind of storyteller, able to tell us her story as if unaware of the implications. In this case, we are allowed to run on ahead of the narrator, down those corridors in the narrative house. The promise here allows us to get ahead in our understanding, while reassuring us that the narrator will catch up with us down the track. That promise and reassurance are the double gift of a well-told story.

Peter Goldsworthy offers the same kind of gift in his story ‘Slowly Last Summer’, although this coming-of-age narrative, told in the first person, suffered a little (perhaps unfairly) from comparison with his story in the 2006 edition (‘Shooting the Dog’), which was a ripper. Patrick Cullen’s story, ‘The Easy Way Out’ paled for the same reason, so similar in tone and theme to an earlier story of his to have me worrying that he might be drifting towards the formulaic. Shane Strange’s story about a Kafkaesque Brisbane, on the other hand, is an auspicious step forward for this Ipswich-based writer.

Before turning to my highlight in this anthology, I want to mention Carmel Bird’s clever and accomplished piece, ‘Her Voice Was Full of Money – And They Were Careless People’ (a quotation from The Great Gatsby). A small group of stories in this collection adopt the meta-text approach, writing about what the act of writing involves, what it means for both writer and reader. Mostly, these stories use the first person again, allowing the narrator to interrogate the act of writing while we watch from outside. Bird, with skill and wit, both distances us and pulls us in, managing to turn her characters into a character-test for the reader, at the same time as she brings them to life. She knows her craft.

Melissa Beit, who lives in Alice Springs, is this year’s surprise newcomer. She delivers a story that has a strong plot, well-paced character development, an exciting setting and, quite a rarity in this anthology, a good old-fashioned twist in the story’s dénouement. Called ‘Nothing to Fear’, it is about a young woman who tries to overcome a sheltered childhood by satisfying an adventure-seeking boyfriend’s expectations. The tension builds, the past is gradually revealed and we are led towards an outcome, only to be gently and satisfyingly confounded. Like Halligan’s narrator, Beit’s narrator (an ‘I’, but very controlled and never blurring into an authorial identity) learns through the experience she describes, and the deftness with which the lesson is revealed elicited a small cheer from this reader. One final thing to say about this fat collection of wildly different writing: the quality of the writing, despite my concerns about some of the ‘I’ stories’ self-control, is uniformly good. There is not a dull moment in the entire book. It is a most impressive volume.