The 10 stories in Lisa Koger`s superb debut collection, Farlanburg Stories (Norton, $17.95), suggest that life is indeed what happens to us while we`re making other plans. All of Koger`s stories are set in the same insular small town (in what feels like the author`s native West Virginia) where life never speeds much past fly-swatting pace. Depending on their ages,
Farlanburg`s inhabitants look either back on or ahead to lives hemmed in by the boundaries of Southern convention.
Koger excels at depicting thwarted dreams, like Louisa Nell`s, the middle-aged country and western singer who forces music lessons on her nieces so they might become the woman she`d once hoped to be and wonders, ”Is it possible to be limited by the smallness of someone else`s dream?”
Koger prevents the collection from sagging under a cumulative bleakness by her benevolence, masterly technique and wit, as in ”Testimony,” a teasingly ironic account, worthy of Eudora Welty, in which a young woman moves from one revival meeting to another testifying how she was saved while her angelic sister fell from grace.
More painful are three stories of elderly women, including the frustrated Della, a vivacious grandmother eager to entertain her visiting son`s family only to find them stodgy, boring and completely unable to accept the love Della is bursting to offer. In ”Ollie`s Gate,” Leafy Lee reminisces about the only woman she knew ”who sounded like she was telling the truth when she said she liked men.” From her childlike viewpoint, she delineates the no-win choice between living the life provincial society demands or living one`s own way and being ostracized. Saddest of all is Eva in ”Structural Changes” who sees both her life and her way of life drawing to a close as she tries to cling to her home, her daughter and her sanity. ”Farlanburg Stories” heralds the debut of a powerful talent.
Published posthumously in Czechoslovakia after the author`s 1973 death from ”mysterious causes,” Ota Pavel`s How I Came to Know Fish (Story Line Press, $16.95) presents a series of autobiographical reflections with enough preference for truth over fact to qualify as fiction. Translators Jindriska Badal and Robert McDowell gently preserve even the cliches of the Czech sportswriter`s Hemingwayesque prose that recounts the childhood of a Bohemian Nick Adams on his own Big Two-Hearted River. There his spunky father, an Electrolux appliance salesman and ”thief of hearts,” teaches young Ota about life as they fish together. Some of the lessons may seem cruel-”I stroked
(the fish`s) strange, cold, fishy body, then stabbed its head with my knife because even the brave must pay for their mistakes with their lives”-but they forge character that helps the boy prepare for the Nazi horror soon to march into his life from the northwest.
The early pages flow charmingly around the eccentric father, particularly his infatuation for Mrs. Irma Koralek, the pretty blond wife of his boss. The father proves so guileless in his machinations to win a few clandestine hugs that even Pavel`s mother seems indulgently amused.
Then the Germans come. Pavel`s tone deepens when the Gestapo seize his father and older brothers and send them to three different concentration camps, leaving Pavel, at 14, to support his mother as a coal miner. Pavel portrays the Nazi presence as more suffocatingly ominous than brutal, as he outlines the charity and gratitude of both Gentile and Jewish villagers in a variety of small actions that reveal large courage.
Written while Pavel battled a manic-depressive psychosis that began while he covered the Czech Olympic team in 1964 at Innsbruck, ”How I Came to Know Fish” contains several characters worth meeting.
A. M. Homes` exuberant talent is more green than ripe in The Safety of Objects (Norton, $17.95). Like the city she lives in, this under-30 New York City writer focuses on her characters` aberrance rather than their humanity. They fail to engage because Homes produces less a shock of recognition than simply a shock. Eventually, we grow numb.
At her worst, Homes dwells on the gratuitously offensive. Yet she has too much promise to ignore. The best of these offbeat stories have a rewarding undercurrent of pathos and fragility. In ”Looking for Johnny,” fatherless 9- year-old Erol tells of his abduction from the playground by a man who keeps calling him Johnny. With uncharacteristic restraint, Homes eschews all the lurid plot possibilities and relates the pair`s innocuous adventures until the man decides Erol is less interesting than he`d hoped. Erol finds himself rejected even by his kidnaper.
”Adults Alone” draws a frightening sketch of marital ennui in the 1990s suburbs. Freed for a few days of their children, Elaine and Paul seek amusement in vodka, pot, porno tapes and sex only to bore and irritate each other until Elaine feels ”she can`t stand anything about him: the way he thinks, talks, looks, all of it. She knows he hates her too and that makes it even worse.”
Pressed to label this collection, one might call it ”tinsel surrealism.” But if the years soften Homes` infatuation with the garish and the kinky, her fresh angle of vision is likely to produce engaging work.
Canadian Carol Shields, on the other hand, demonstrates in her ninth book a fully mature vision long overdue for appreciation in the United States. Most of the characters in The Orange Fish (Viking, $17.95) are at unsettling moments in their lives but find the insight or support that enables them to go on.
Two excellent stories describe groups that sustain their members.
”Chemistry” conveys the ”amorous steam” circulating among a ”love-drugged circle” in the early 1970s who meet to play music. ”This is a world we`re making,” they believe, ”not just a jumble of noise,” and they treasure their privileged intimacy for years after they cease to meet. In the title story a couple disturbed by imminent middle age buys one of 10 prints of a lithograph of an orange fish. With the other nine owners they form a group where each describes the experience of owning the print. Their accounts transform the fish into a kind of Rorschach blot on which each owner projects his deepest concerns. A kind of magical current builds through the group-only to be dispersed when 10,000 poster copies of the print roll off the presses.
Shields` precise, fluid prose yields a variety of styles, a divergence of characters and uniform excellence. She can be optimistic, as in the story of newly widowed ”Hazel,” who at 50 enters the work force and achieves success just being herself. Shields can be poetic when describing the holiday dinner of a Winnipeg family in ”Fuel for the Fire,” where a fireplace becomes the image both of cozy affection and life`s passing: ”how economical it is, how it eats up everything we give it, everything we have to offer.”
With The American Story (Cane Hill Press, $8.95 paper) StoryQuarterly reissues not only the ”best of” but also some of the worst of the literary magazine`s offerings over its 15 years of publication.
But there are four stories that make this collection rewarding. Stephen Dixon`s ”Frog Dances” tellingly chronicles singles life in our time. Pity, for a short while only, the fortyish college professor who glances through a window at a man dancing with a baby and decides it`s time to find a
”lifemate” who can put him in that scene.
In ”Late Summer: Driving North,” Ann Beattie turns her eye for the perfect detail to the deteriorating marriage of an academic whose career sputters at a college where ”they fired any teacher who was liked excessively by all the students.”
Linda Svendsen renders a glistening scene of parenting at its best. In
”Up Late” a 6-year-old and her recently widowed mother stop for a swim at a lake on an August night, and in just six pages we see how a mother`s words and actions can coat a child`s eyes with innocent beauty.
In Lowri Pei`s ”Naked Women,” poor Toby has long forgotten the nude pictures he`d stored away of his old girlfriends. They aren`t ancient history to his wife Elaine, though, when she comes upon them in the basement. Pei`s delightfully quirky voice unfolds the resulting fight and how close it takes them to the edge before they see how clear it also has made the bond between them.
