THE STORIES IN PETER ORNER'S LATEST collection, like those in his previous two, are grouped into sections loosely organized around an era, theme or location, and vary widely in length. While at first I found myself flipping ahead, trying to get a handle on the size and scope of each new one, I soon gave in to the pleasure of not knowing how long the trip would be, experiencing a mild shock when (often sooner than later) its dense world ended and I was tipped into white space. Then another story would begin, set in Illinois or California or coastal Massachusetts, populated by a variety of characters: male, female; young, old. Whether a prisoner, a writer, a lawyer, a custodian, a grad student, a camp director or a salesman, all are intent on finding meaning in their lives, or on questioning its absence. There's a beautiful drifting quality to "Maggie Brown & Others," a sense of being invited inside a roving, kaleidoscopic mind - reluctant to generalize, tender, astute, with an eye for both comedy and heartache - and adopting its rhythms as your own. If Orner is bold in his embrace of unconventional narrative structures and organizing principles (there aren't a lot of Freytag's Pyramids here, and the connections between stories are often oblique), his work is also without pretense, powerfully aware of how difficult it is to capture experience on the page. His characters regularly muse on the act of storytelling, sometimes as writers or readers, but more often as plain-spoken, ordinary people, struggling to hide or reveal, bridge differences and resist glib formulations in the face of the serious threats posed by mortality, estrangement and the rush of time. "His voice cracked but he couldn't muster any words," Orner writes in "The Return." "How to even begin? How to stuff all the years into a few words? But wasn't this the frightening thing? You could. In two, three, four sentences, you could jam 14 years, easy." Elsewhere, the stories comment on the paucity of their own telling ("They were like similarly overweight leopards hunting alone - the image doesn't quite work, but the point is they were solitary predators"), but in a mild-mannered way, as if to say "Just do your best with what you've got." At times, some of the stories start to feel gloomily repetitive, rehashing failed marriages or love affairs. More interesting is the way Orner captures the power of flickering encounters that don't count as major milestones but persist in memory for what they have unleashed: a violent urge, a sharp regret, a renewed estrangement from or connection to the self. In the haunting title story, we read of the narrator's memories of his onetime lover, a young cellist named Maggie Brown, and of his college roommate, both long absent from his life. "You end up forgetting the people you shouldn't and remembering the people who've forgotten all about you," the narrator remarks. "For me what echoes, what reverberates, what I often relive and relive are those times that were cut short, times so fleeting they hardly even happened." Perhaps the collection's most powerful section is its final one, a wonderfully granular, funny yet also moving novella-instories set in Fall River, Mass. Here we encounter Walt Kaplan, a furniture salesman whom fans of Orner will remember from previous books. Now it's 1977, and Walt, 58, is in the Truesdale Hospital post-heart attack. He's aging too fast in a fading city where "the only Jews who stayed... were the ones who'd died and the ones waiting for the opportunity." Jumping around wildly in time, and with time's passage as its central concern, the novella builds a rich mosaic of Walt's life and of Fall River, a touchstone locale in Orner's work. "Walt Kaplan Is Broke" has the heft of a novel while allowing for the rough edges, gaps and echoes enabled by Orner's collagelike use of shorter forms. "If you tried to take into account all the heartbreak behind the lighted windows of a single city on a single night," Orner writes in the memorable story "Ineffectual Tribute to Len," "your head would explode clean off your neck." "Lighted Windows" is the title of the collection's second section, but the phrase might apply to the whole book. Peter Orner is a wonderful guide, training our gaze from window to window, where we find reflections of ourselves even as we glimpse the inscrutable, captivating lives on the other side of the glass. Elizabeth graver's latest novel is "The End of the Point." |