Canadian writer Hal Niedzviecki made his mark as a cultural critic with Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity and The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, both published by City Lights. Now Niedzviecki’s story collection, Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened, affords readers an opportunity to apply his social criticism to fictional worlds. In his hands, being wonky has never been more fun.

The collection encompasses a range of literary genres, from magical to domestic realism, from the absurdity of a fetus quoting statistics to dialogue so fresh you’ll look around to see who’s talking. At no point in the title story are we told “a guy named Bradley” has killed himself; but when one character phones another to ask, “Did you hear about Bradley?” we know we’re in the realm of prurient fascination with another’s tragedy. Because Niedzviecki eschews quotation marks, it’s not always possible to tell who—if anyone—is speaking out loud. We see Bradley’s friend Mickers walk onto a bridge, accompanied by an unnamed first-person narrator. The hortatory final sentence floats in air on feelings of loss, voyeurism, and ennui: “Look down, this is where it must have happened.”

“Special Topic: Terrorism,” begins: “The bat thudded against the window. Peter felt it—broken glass in his gut—though the window didn’t break. … Laurie poked the window with the bat. The whole thing fell apart.” Yes, there are not any small winged rodents; Peter and Laurie are college students fulfilling an assignment. When Peter’s team presents a slide show documenting their destruction of an SUV, the professor announces that, “in this class we don’t deal with … uh … actualities.” Too bad one of their teammates, a girl named Star, has already sprayed paint and glue into the face of a man returning to his vehicle. Meanwhile—in the real/virtual world—12,349 people view the slides Peter foolishly uploaded to YouTube; soon the police are sniffing around his apartment and questioning his roommates.

Niedzviecki prompts readers to ask: What is essential? How do we know what we know? His withholding of such narrative staples as full names and physical descriptions proves to be an effective literary technique, except when his reticence is unintentionally revealing of a moral blind spot. In “Punk Rock Role Model,” unconfirmed hints that the unnamed narrator has raped his girlfriend, Sheils, lend the narrator an aura of darkness without shaping a reader’s understanding of him. There’s plenty of outré humor: One night, after the narrator sniffs glue and passes out in a puddle of vomit, he is kicked, hugged, and sung to by a moribund punk rock star who is naked except for a pair of cowboy boots. But it’s disconcerting to see rape reduced from a character-defining deed to the level of stagecraft, comparable to the dry-ice “fog” of arena rock.

Hal Niedzviecki

In The Peep Diaries, Niedzviecki posits that successful personal blogs show “how your blog persona feels at a specific moment,” while Twitter is about “deriving a sense of community and commonality through sharing the details—your details or other people’s details.” This could be a recipe for a great short story, as evidenced by the companion pieces “Displacement” and “Sometime Next Sunrise.”

Shlomo, the hero of “Displacement,” and his mother—Bubby—left Russia for a city we can assume is Montreal. Many years have since passed, and when we meet Shlomo his mother has died “alone in front of the television.” The frequent, abrupt transitions characteristic of Niedzviecki’s style evoke the lasting presence of traumatic events in a survivor’s mind. We jump from Shlomo urging his wife to sample his culinary inventions to Shlomo’s memory of visiting his mom when his kids were little—“Buddha Bubby hovering over the kitchen table, shabbos candles shrinking into themselves.” Then comes a succinct and deeply moving description of life in a displaced persons camp:

All spring we waited. The days were empty, nothing to do but line up for bread and soup. Enough for everyone. The ones who were going to die had all died. I felt my arms thicken and my legs no longer trembled when I ran. Nobody spoke of the past. There could not have been a past.

The story includes a surreal account of six-year-old Shlomo’s visit to a village at the bottom of a river, and it ends with Shlomo at a meeting of formerly displaced persons in Washington, D.C. When an elderly woman asks, “Weren’t you the one? The little boy who ran away?” the emotional impact is devastating.

“Sometime Next Sunrise” presents a man much like Shlomo (here called “The Dad”) as seen by his thirty-three-year-old son. The narrator and his girlfriend Rainy are taking a beach vacation with the narrator’s parents. Not much happens, really. Mom runs interference when The Dad wants everyone to play a round of putt-putt golf and their son says no way. There’s a heart-wrenching and hilarious father-son tequila bar scene. A moment when the narrator confesses to wanting Rainy completely. Along with the details, we get a sense of life’s mystery lurking just beyond our vision.

Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened reveals the super powers of story telling for the digital age—or any age.

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What makes a good ventriloquist’s show so enjoyable is that you know the dummy’s not really talking. When reading Something for Nothing, the suspenseful first novel by David Anthony, I had to examine the teeny photo on the back cover a couple of times to convince myself that the author wasn’t some old codger who, half a century after putting pen to paper, had finally gotten his rant about gas lines, teenage rebellion, and America’s waning power published. But no. Anthony appears to be a young writer who, without a single anachronistic misstep, has fabricated a ’70s period piece complete with a toupee-wearing hero who thinks, acts, and talks exactly as I would expect him to.

Anthony works hard to make us hate the poor schmuck, Martin Anderson, and yet I couldn’t help liking him—even if he is a self-involved compulsive liar who lives in a fantasy world and supports President Nixon. Like any good action hero, Martin is really good at facing physical dangers that terrify reasonable people, such as piloting small planes and making conversation with gorgeous large-breasted women. He resides in suburban Contra Costa County, where his home with a pool is located in the inexplicably renamed “Walnut Station.” (All other place names, from Pleasanton to Ensenada, go unchanged.) He’s married with two kids and owns his own company that sells used aircraft. He worries continuously about how others see him, so that when his thirteen-year old daughter storms out of a restaurant and he drives after her, shouting out the window of his Caddy for her to “’get in the fucking car,’” his chief concern is that onlookers will be thinking, “That guy’s not in control of his family.”

Martin’s big problem is debt: mountains of it. In his highly prejudicial worldview, “the Arabs” have jacked up the price of oil, and now they’re hoarding the world’s greenbacks in their palaces. Meanwhile, poor Martin can’t sell any planes because none of his potential customers can afford the cost of fuel. What’s a fellow to do? Run drugs over the Mexican border, of course! Val Desmond, who trains Martin’s racehorse Temperature’s Rising, offers to pay Martin $5,000 per trip to fly cash down and heroin back up. Complications of the grisliest, deadliest sort soon arise.

David Anthony

Anthony is terrific at providing the realistic detail to delight armchair fans of midnight landings on runways lit by burning kerosene-soaked rags. He’s also great on horse racing, from the intricacies of betting to the etiquette of the Winner’s Circle, and he really knows fishing boats. After reading this novel, I feel as if I could find my way around a fishing boat blindfolded. In fact, I began to actively desire being stuck out on a boat on a foggy evening in Suisun Bay with only a .22 to protect me (and my hard-earned drug money) from the sadistic last-person-I-would-have-guessed-to-be-the-villain. Just so I could have the chance to come out ahead, despite my painfully obvious personal limitations. So I could be like—Martin Anderson!

Don’t be fooled by the literary veneer, because you are at serious risk of missing your transit stop when reading this novel. Yes, the realistic details are there; but with the exception of Martin, the characters are flat. And Martin is so limited in his thinking that his more philosophical reflections on life and its meaning must, of necessity, remain sophomoric. The style is workmanlike, but the plot is exceptionally well made, such that every seemingly random scene turns out to be necessary. A brilliant example is the early episode when Martin takes his nine-year-old son on a fishing trip to fill up the days during which young Peter is suspended from school. Is the purpose of this scene to show us readers what a feckless yet lovable dude Martin is? Yes, but key details provided here are also key to the unfolding of the novel’s climax many pages later. Discovering that connection, in those tense moments when the hero’s life hung in the balance, was very satisfying to this reader.

If the ’70s were eerily present throughout (Martin finds margaritas strange, anti-Semitic jokes amusing, and “traffic backups” familiar), one stylistic tic came to seem irritatingly authorial, and therefore presumably amenable to change. Having just demonstrated this linguistic habit, I will do so again by quoting Something for Nothing: “Martin walked quickly up the left side of his circular driveway (he liked the fact that he had this setup, thought that it set him apart from all the people with boring, perpendicular driveways).”

David Anthony: Please lose the too-oft-occurring parentheses before publishing your next gripping, thoroughly enjoyable work of fiction.

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It’s hard to sympathize with the heroine of Down from Cascom Mountain, the first novel by Ann Joslin Williams. Yes, twenty-eight-year-old Mary Walker has lost her young husband Michael in a hiking accident, but the circumstances of her summer of grief are positively idyllic. She has come to live in the house where she grew up in New Hampshire, a mountain retreat so secluded she has to drive up and over sheer granite ledges to get there. She doesn’t need to find a job anytime soon, and she enjoys a nearly constant interchange of affectionate camaraderie with the youthful, musically talented, sexually available staff of a nearby resort lodge. As if all that weren’t enough, Mary becomes the object of a brilliant (yet troubled) local boy’s selfless ardor. In the rare moments when she’s alone and lonely, all Mary has to do is look up to the eaves of her roof, where young Tobin will be sitting and kicking his feet, just waiting for her to notice him. And he does chores around the house.

Sometimes books fail at their apparent object—to explore grief, for example—while succeeding at another. Adolescence—with its conflicting desires, its painful flashes of self-awareness, and delusions of immortality—may be the true subject of this novel. In a prelude, we’re told the story of a girl who mysteriously vanishes after her male companion dies of exposure on Cascom Mountain. These events take place during the summer when Mary, then seventeen, worked at the lodge. Since that time, the missing girl has become legendary. “Ghost girl,” as she is known, is a classic Peter-Pan figure: a child who doesn’t die and yet never has to grow up. By contrast, sixteen-year-old Callie, who works at the lodge during the summer Mary loses Michael, takes tenuous steps toward adulthood. We first meet Callie when she’s swimming in the pond at night with other lodge staff, and we are privy to her reflections about helping to carry Michael’s body down from the mountain that afternoon. Callie is “sad for that lady”—Mary—but happy about the amorous advances of her crew boss, Spencer. Later that same night, Callie loses her virginity to Spencer. In the coming weeks, she continues to have sex with Spencer even though she has developed a huge crush on Ben, the fire watchman. Mary also has her eye on Ben.

Many parallels exist between Callie and Mary’s summertime experiences. If Mary’s reflections on widowhood can seem as perfunctory as Callie’s “sad for that lady,” Mary’s attraction to Ben has a satisfying visceral quality. Whether she’s climbing the mountain to see him or wordlessly acknowledging Tobin when he catches her skinny dipping in a creek, Mary comes alive when her libido is unleashed.

Ann Joslin Williams

The creek scene showcases Williams’ ability to unify her heroine’s past and present experiences, along with her future hopes, in a sensuous emotionally charged present. It begins with Mary nostalgically recalling girlhood trips to the same swimming hole with her parents. Realizing that Michael has died before she could bring him to the creek, she succumbs to grief: “The frozen water beat against her chest and spooled around her neck. A sob came unexpectedly from deep in her throat, and then more, and she let them come, let herself cry hard and loose and horribly.”

Here, the author’s quiet lyricism functions as a kind of ballast, holding our attention as we move through a series of rapid mood and tonal changes. Almost as soon as she gets out of the water, Mary begins thinking about the advantages of her new freedom. Now that she’s single again, she can do whatever she wants. She could even have a baby! She then becomes aware of Tobin watching her: “Perhaps it was the sun, so warm, like a covering on her skin that made her only mildly uncomfortable with her nudity. And the rock, so smooth, holding her in its slight curve and basin. Or it might have been Tobin’s lack of expression—a composed observer—that made the moment more a curiosity than shock.”

We see Tobin through the eyes of Mary, Callie, and others; but we get to know him best in chapters written from his point of view. Like Mary, Tobin grew up on Cascom Mountain. At sixteen, he’s a socially awkward loner who exhibits symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. His “tall, dark, cruel” mentally ill mother, now institutionalized, has subjected him to treatment ranging from capricious to life -threatening. When he was little, she pushed him off a roof—no wonder he’s terrified of her! Sadly, Tobin’s father, an amateur painter, is more interested in having his wife return home so he can use her for a model than in raising his son. Before summer’s end, Dad succeeds in bringing Mom back, and Tobin’s response to her homecoming sets in motion the most dramatic action this novel has to offer. Everybody at the lodge, Mary included, mobilizes to prevent new untimely deaths—due to suicide and/or fire—from occurring.

And then summer’s over.

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Winner of the 2011 Northern California Book Award for Fiction, Ivan and Misha by Michael Alenyikov is best described as a novel in stories. Many-faceted love—from the intense and fleeting to bonds of familial obligation—is the book’s subject, one that requires a complex interplay of character and plot in five lengthy tales to explore. Throughout the prose is plain, prophetic in tone. What happens to us when we love? How terrible are the deeds that love can make us commit? What does it mean to live for another? When the lines between love, madness, and death begin to blur, you know you’re in Alenyikov territory.

Just as the titular fraternal twins Ivan and Misha meet before they are born, so we are introduced to the principle characters in a prologue. During their childhood in Kiev, Ivan and Misha “were rarely apart, and when they were, they shared all at night; they whispered details in soft voices so as not to wake Papa.” Together with their father, Lyov (no surname given), the boys emigrate from Russia to New York City shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In the title story, which takes place in 2000 when the twins are 23, Misha emerges as an unusually compassionate and accommodating person. He lives in the East Village with his lover, a younger man who goes by the name of Smith. Ivan, who lives nearby, is bipolar, in and out of Bellevue and dangerously close to breaking his brother’s heart. “When Ivan bleeds, I bleed,” says Misha, our narrator. Meanwhile, Lyov—or Louie, as he styles himself after leaving the old country—has had a stroke. Misha reports that he’s become “something holographic, so when you put your arms around him for a hug you’re stuck hugging yourself.”

Stories narrated by Louie and Ivan (among others) reveal inaccuracies in Misha’s perception of reality. In the contemporary American short story, deceit has often been celebrated if not glorified; Ivan and Misha offers a realistic assessment of falsehood, from misunderstandings and harmless inventions through cruel, self-serving lies. Unifying the book is a single “unforgiveable” lie that impacts each of the main characters, contributing to their more bizarre actions. Lesser lies abound. Smith, who tries on personas like T-shirts, tells Misha his parents have died in a car crash when they’re really alive; his lie is never explained beyond a need “to pretend.” Louie is determined to make his sons go through life believing their mother died giving birth to them. The reasons for this lie are clear, if misguided: Louie wants to spare his boys the painful truth that their mother committed suicide when they were very young.

Michael Alenyikov

Transitioning almost imperceptibly from memories of romancing his wife-to-be in Odessa to the Brighton Beach deli where Louie and his friend Leo stop for hot dogs and knishes on their way home from a walk, the story “Barrel of Laughs” keeps us grounded in the feelings and physicality of its narrator. Leo asks Louie if it bugs him that his son is a “feygela.” The question bugs Louie a lot. He reflects, “I think he truly wants to understand what to him is unfathomable, so I forgive him, because, to be completely honest with you, I do not fully understand what my son does with men.”

Louie may be a hologram to his beloved Mishka, but to the reader he is profoundly human. His confession suggests a possible moral for the book: love means allowing other people to remain mysterious.

Was Raskolnikov bipolar? Louie posits a troika of Russian literary greats from which the creator of Crime and Punishment is excluded; but Dostoevsky came often to my mind while reading the longest story, “Whirling Dervish.” Its narrator is Ivan, eighteen years old and on day seven without sleep as the story begins. In defiance of Misha’s, Louie’s, and even his doctors’ orders not to fall in love—because it excites him too much—Ivan is head over heels for a man from California who, like him, works as a taxi driver. Ivan lies awake under a ceiling fan, hugging his pet rabbit and sweating in the August heat. He’s painted the word love in many different languages on the wall and has surrounded himself with ticking clocks and religious symbols, including Stars of David for his father and Orthodox icons for his mother. He works the night shift, thinking of nothing but the man from California as two more days without sleep go by. He cannot rest until he has attained the object of his obsessive desire. In a comic twist, when the Californian unexpectedly takes him to bed Ivan falls asleep mid-kiss, his love still unconsummated.

The unforgivable lie is told to Misha by his former lover Kevin, who is several years older than the twins. In the last story, Kevin takes us back to the early stages of the AIDS epidemic (1983) and the hospital room of his dying ex-lover, Vinnie. Kevin tells of going to sleep asking, “Who did what to whom?” He gets no answer because “those were the days when you died real fast and there was nothing, at least in bed, that Vinnie had done that I hadn’t done too.”

In Ivan and Misha, both subjectivity and time are fluid. Tenses run the gamut from the pluperfect to future conditional, often in a single paragraph. Because present tense predominates, the overall effect is one of informed immediacy. The past, with its horrors, exerts an influence, and the future, in which death divides us from the people we love, continuously makes itself felt.

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If you could hold a seashell to your ear and hear an account of a poet’s life, it might have the exquisite depth and simplicity of Michael Sledge’s The More I Owe You, a novel about Elizabeth Bishop. Although the Pulitzer Prize winner was born in Massachusetts in 1911, Sledge’s novel begins with Bishop on her way to visit Brazil for the first time in 1951: “The ship crossed the equator some time in the night… the sky was vast, with half a moon and masses of soft, oily-looking stars.” Thus a reader is primed for prose that will consistently reach for and attain the heights of poetry.

Divided into three parts by time period, The More I Owe You braids together three strands of the poet’s life: the allure of Brazil, where Bishop sojourned for fifteen years; her long-term relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares; and her creative process. Along the way, readers are treated to fascinating descriptions of plants, animals, politics, architecture—all of which take on urgency that is crucial to our understanding of Bishop herself.

“I’ve been working more steadily than ever,” Bishop tells a friend, confessing in the next breath to the anxiety which is becoming an internal conflict—that people living in the favelas (slums) will never read her poems. “I know that sounds self-absorbed, but what I mean is, they don’t truly benefit anyone.” From the terrace of the Copacabana apartment where she writes—often wearing only a slip due to the oppressive heat—she overlooks a tarp city erected by striking workers. When Governor Carlos Lacerda, who is closely allied to Bishop’s lover, Lota, issues a call to Rio’s citizens to defend his administration, the poet runs out into the rainy streets to join a crowd that’s “jubilant, shouting and calling to one another, just like Carnaval, when people were soaked to the skin with sweat and joy and cachaça.” But trouble soon arrives: “A rumbling and clanking, then the human sea parted before three tanks advancing toward the palace.” Bishop stays to see the soldiers declare their loyalty to the governor, and the scene ends with her and Lota madly kissing each other “right there in front of the world.”

Michael Sledge

The More I Owe You is, above all, a love story. Even for those readers familiar with Bishop’s biography, Sledge creates suspense in the dance of attraction between the shy poet and charismatic Lota. One step forward, two steps back… how will they ever get together? The inevitability of their union becomes more and more palpable, but is complicated by Lota’s live-in lover, Mary, who will play a role in Bishop’s life for years to come. The complications proliferate: Elizabeth’s asthma and drinking bouts, Lota’s frustrated ambition, friendships that get in the way, social taboos. With respectful delicacy, Sledge probes the quarrels and outbursts of temper that result in separations followed by joyful reconciliations. His Bishop recalls both the “nightmare” years leading up to Lota’s death and “the exquisite tenderness of floating side by side in the pool at Samambaia on a hot summer afternoon, such peace between them that butterflies alit on their arms and faces to drink the moisture from their skin.”

Sledge has authored one previous book, the memoir Mother and Son. To write this novel, he relied on Bishop’s journals and letters (her correspondence with Robert Lowell alone fills a large volume), as well as published biographies. Each section of the novel is prefaced by one of Bishop’s poems, setting the mood and providing clues to what will follow. Unsparing of Bishop when describing her capacity for wounding the people closest to her, Sledge introduces Part Three with a poem that takes on a piercing sadness in the context of Lota’s death.

We see “the immediate world” mostly through Bishop’s eyes, though brief sections are written from Lota’s point of view. Departing from chronology, Sledge describes key events from Bishop’s childhood and treats some of the Brazil episodes through flashbacks. When referring to mementoes of Brazil that Bishop had with her at her death, years later in Boston; Sledge uses the future tense to recount their acquisition for the reader: “The oratorio of Saint Barbara that Lili gave her will sit on a shelf above her desk. Fittingly, on the autumn afternoon Saint Barbara witnesses her death, Elizabeth will be at work, making revisions to a poem that isn’t yet right.” Elsewhere Sledge tells us, “She will dream of the Amazon for the rest of her life, she will write about it, but she will never go back,” and concludes with the image of the poet clutching “the hard mud nest of a wasp given her by a friendly pharmacist,” a fitting metaphor for this stunning, heartbreaking novel itself: hard to let go of, and impossible to forget.

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Devotees of close reading will want to read Ether, Evgenia Citkowitz’s collection of stories and a novella, more than once. Each reading will reveal greater nuance and depth. If you’re someone who likes to plug authors’ names into search engines, you’ll discover that Citkowitz—she’s a Guinness heiress!—belongs to the storied Anglo-Irish nobility, which may account for the rarefied atmosphere of this debut collection.

On a practical level, Citkowitz’s characters are preoccupied by the trials of second-home ownership, the need to schedule “privates” with yoga teachers, and whether it’s fair to accuse Mummy of ruining one’s life when she’s just come in from a party and hasn’t yet had a chance to take off her pinnacle heels. Questions of obligation and shame concern these characters deeply. Slightly unhinged, they muddle through life, often disappointing one another. Their stories, sometimes vague and wandering, could likewise disappoint the reader—but for the most part Citkowitz only flirts with failure on her way to success.

Take “Happy Love,” about the backyard burial of a child’s pet hamster. Candayce, the child’s mother, uses a spoon to dig Peanut’s grave because she doesn’t know where the shovel is kept. Even if we fail to sympathize with Candayce, whose privileged life increasingly comes to resemble a shell game, we’re intrigued by her search for meaning. In grotesque detail, she recounts Peanut’s dental problems. Meanwhile, her husband announces the birth of his child by another woman. Before the banality of it all can overwhelm the reader, Citkowitz provides a key to the story’s existential gloom: “She remembered her mother’s transfiguration. The three weeks it took for her limbs to waste, her skin to turn a liverish yellow, and her mind to wash away on a sea of morphine. Afterward, the jocose Irish nurse opened the windows to set free her soul.”

Evgenia Citkowitz

Just as Peanut the hamster has symbolic import, so does the eponymous piece of antique furniture in “The Bachelor’s Table.” For Jonathan, the question of whether he’s obliged to pay a fair price for the table comes to bear on his sense of self-worth as the love child of an esteemed art critic who never publicly acknowledges paternity. Peevish and self-absorbed, Jonathan delights in toying with the antique shop’s owner. He is unmoved by the tears of the confused, elderly woman who mistakenly sold him the table for a fraction of its value. When the veneer is damaged due to a careless mistake, Jonathan exults.

He gains our sympathy when he bumps up against limits ruthlessly established by the author. Citkowitz can be poetic, as when Jonathan first discovers the table: “The moment he saw it, he knew what it was. Like a chance encounter with a deliberately forgotten love, he felt a rush of disbelief, followed by plunging disappointment and longing.” Such prose sets up an off-balance feeling—the slightly unhinged quality of mind that in these stories seems inseparable from cultural refinement. But Citkowitz doles out poetic language sparingly. More characteristic is her bluntness, as when Jonathan, upon making the happy discovery that he doesn’t resent his wife, thinks, “The opposite of resentment is what? Something good. Her only shortcoming was that she was married to him.”

The despicable trait of using other people to achieve one’s own ends is relieved by hilarious social ineptitude in “Leavers’ Events.” Beatty, who attends an exclusive London girls’ school, needs an escort to the opera. When her sexy English teacher accepts the invitation, she hopes to get lucky with him on her mother’s couch. What follows is nails-on-the-blackboard-style humor, where a reader risks embarrassing herself in public by admonishing fictional characters out loud: No, Beatty! Don’t start talking about your essay on Pope when he has his fingers in your knickers!

London yields to Manhattan, Manhattan to the Pacific Palisades. The novella, “Ether,” follows the downward trajectory of a writer whose career takes him from New York to Los Angeles, where he immediately meets—and inexplicably weds—a famous actress. With little warning, the narrative shifts focus first to the actress herself, and then to a downtrodden waitress and her autistic son. In the tangle of events, it’s easier to determine the motivation—profit—of the sleazy drifter who befriends “the retarded boy” than it is to understand the attraction between the writer and his actress wife. When the drifter makes a porn video that destroys the boy’s friendship with the actress, we’re meant to see a parallel between such exploitation and a too-autobiographical novel left out for the wife to find. But the connection feels strained. In the longer form of the novella, too many unhinged characters add up to not enough storyline.

Try approaching the stories by asking, is this one the ghost story? In the eerie fictions of Ether, a character’s disorientation—whether due to supernatural causes, mental illness, or bad choices—serves as a metaphor for the unsettled times in which we all live.

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Twenty-eight year-old Paul Tusifale is too young for a midlife crisis, and with two years in San Quentin behind him, he’s way beyond coming-of-age. The hero of What We Are, a curiously obsessive first novel by Peter Nathaniel Malae, isn’t sure why he has such a bee in his bonnet, but he knows he’ll have to wait to figure it out until after dealing with the “suburban zombie on crystal meth” who spots him on a street corner at three in the morning and asks him for a handout.

In a roller-coaster series of nocturnal events, Paul fends off “the crankster,” who comes after him with a knife, then offers to treat his assailant to a burger at a nearby fast-food restaurant, where he defends a lady’s honor by shoving the burger in the crankster’s face. After passing out drunk at the feet of a statue of Jesus, Paul wakes to find “the clover-green eyes” of his old priest staring down at him; before he knows it, Paul has agreed to take part in a Cinco de Mayo rally. ¡Sí, se puede!

On its face, the novel’s title suggests both communal and individual aspects of identity. What defines Paul? If blood, he’s half Samoan, half white. If experience, his years in prison are counter-balanced by those spent at an elite all-boys’ Catholic prep school. As Paul says, he’s a tough guy who’s also smart. Raised in San Jose, CA, he’s torn between his old stomping grounds and the magnetic pull of his long-absent father in Polynesia. (Paul’s college-educated mom and working-class dad were divorced not long after he, at age nine, and his sister, at age ten, witnessed their first Filipino cockfight during a family party.) A man of dualities, the plural title could therefore refer to Paul alone.

Peter Nathaniel Malae

Right down to their saintly first names, Paul shares much in common with the author. Malae achieved literary fame early when nominated for the prestigious New York Public Library Young Lion Award for his superb short-story collection, Teach the Free Man. Paul Tusifale’s vocation is poetry, and we soon learn that he’s been “lionized” with a fellowship: his poetry has garnered him the financial support, and amatory attentions, of La Dulce, a wealthy Haitian who finds him irresistible. When Paul gets accused of a hate crime at the Cinco de Mayo rally and is sent back to jail, La Dulce bails him out; she then escorts him to Silicon University of the Valley—note the acronym—where he mingles with absurdly pompous literati until it’s time for his next fistfight.

Although What We Are has some of the qualities of a philosophical novel, I often felt as if I were reading it with my thumbs—as in playing Halo—as the plot incessantly enters its main character in hand-to-hand combat. Even a job shelving books at the Santa Clara Library leads Paul into battle. When Cyrus, an elderly Iranian immigrant who is Paul’s friend and co-worker, gets mugged, Paul nearly kills the mugger. He flees, gets caught, and is charged with attempted murder. The incident dramatizes this novel’s central concern with what we’re here to do. After befriending Cyrus, Paul longs to prove his love by means of some significant act. Ordinary social interactions seem insufficient; for a strong, healthy, young male inclined to fight, anything short of lethal combat represents soul-killing compromise. And so the novel demands: What are we to do with men? How do we start them up—and, once they’re started, how do we get them to stop? Is Ritalin the answer? Ritual combat culminating in human sacrifice, as the Aztecs practiced? For a nation at war with an all-volunteer army, such questions should be compelling. In fact, readers of literary fiction may find them all to easy to ignore.

Despite the serial nature of Paul’s adventures, to the extent that What We Are has a form, it’s less picaresque romp than a sustained archetypal encounter between Father and Son. Cyrus and Paul’s complex relationship is mirrored by that of Paul and his appropriately named Uncle Rich. Plagued by memories of the Vietnam War, Uncle Rich unburdens himself to his nephew. Most of these dialogs take place in bars, with the older man drowning his sorrows in Jack Daniels as he probes Paul’s heart and his own.

In jail and awaiting trial, Paul receives a visit from Cyrus. In a short but very moving scene, Cyrus tells him that their friendship is over. “I was leaving Iran because of men like you. Thank you very much. Good-bye.”

Behind bars, Paul laments:

There are still men out there—right?—digging holes and laying brick and pouring cement and driving truck and lifting weights at the gym not for the mirror or the Maxim recommendation on how to get women, but to—what’s this?—be brave and strong in the endurance of pain and to dispense their masculine anger in a socially acceptable venue. I mean, right? We’re still out there, us dying men, dying to die for our woman, our child, our cause, whatever it is, and if we can’t, then just being strong for them, being strong period, imperturbable in this storm of life.

The murder charge soon dropped, the novel follows our would-be hero as he goes to work in his uncle’s real-estate business. By imagining “the smoothness of vanilla milkshakes” Paul is able to get through the day without ending up in handcuffs. Various social issues are examined, from illegal immigration to contemporary child rearing, from walk-a-thons to sub-prime mortgages. Paul’s virility fails him when he attempts to pleasure an old woman who has had a mastectomy. Paul plays handball with Norteño gang members. Paul saves his white brother-in-law from getting beaten up (again.) Paul quotes Kerouac and Shakespeare. While going seventy on the freeway, Paul spars verbally with a Hummer driver who responds by cutting him off and… everything goes black. To Be Continued…

One of the novel’s final images is of Paul careening down a steep and treacherous path on his bicycle, “the gravity of the real fake world in which I live too strong to brake against.” That pretty much says it all.

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I once learned of a fascinating conundrum. “Those who know don’t tell,” remarked the wily subject of a newspaper article I was writing, “and those who tell, don’t know.” He was messing with me but also getting at a truth that confronts fiction writers, especially when the stories they want most to tell come from a world remote from their readers’ experience.

In the short-story collection Elegy for a Fabulous World, her first book written in English, Romanian-born writer Alta Ifland conveys what it was like to grow up in Eastern Europe under Communism. Acknowledging the limitations of memory and claiming a reverence for truth, while expressing a contempt for facts (the raw ingredients of propaganda, infinitely susceptible to spin), Ifland lays down her reality manifesto in one of the volume’s first stories: “As soon as I became conscious of existing, I was aware of a strong impulse in me for mystification, for the artistic lie.” In the strongest of Ifland’s stories, the artistic lie functions as a kind of meander, allowing her watery narratives to flow in and out of places the reader never expected them to go.

“The Road to Dombrad” is a fine example of Ifland’s style. Initially the story seems to be an autobiographical sketch, a fond recollection of a small-town caged bear. With deadpan humor, the narrator observes that when children stuck their hands through the bars of the cage to feed the bear, the omnivorous fellow “would take, together with the candy, the child’s arm too, and sometimes even the whole child… With time, the park bear grew quite unpopular among our town’s good folks.”

Alta Ifland

But what is “The Road to Dombrad” really about? After an amusing digression on Eastern European weddings, and some extraordinarily good descriptions of relatives fat and thin, readers suddenly find ourselves at a train station. Now the narrator settles in to recount an overnight trip to Dombrad taken during the “coldest winter in half a century.” The tone of the narration up to this point leads us to expect a rollicking adventure, but the trip seems uneventful. We hear in great detail of a cold night on a train. Not until the shocking penultimate paragraph do we learn that some passengers froze to death in their seats. The narrator concludes:

I joined the little line that had formed in the narrow corridor with the sensation that my bones were reluctant to follow me. But they were my bones and the pact of life still existed between us. The train stopped and I stepped out into the blinding daylight.

In the title story, first published in the journal AGNI, Ifland’s talent for portraiture is on full display. Such fat aunts! Such “voluptuous,” “obsessive” uncles! Best of all is her description of Sandra, a twelve-year-old Hungarian girl whose “Botticellian face was in sharp and unexpected contrast with her abrupt, razor-blade personality.” Sandra’s friendship with the narrator blossoms during a summer vacation spent at a beach resort; it’s a Black Sea idyll, filled with Hungarian dominoes, outdoor movies, lace curtains blowing in the wind during afternoon naps, and sardonic judgments made by the two girls against everybody else. The most active thing around is the narrator’s memory; but the story is saved from static sentimentality by the searing contrast between an interlude of happiness and “the reality that suffocated us with its gray slime dripping off the TV screens where thousands of Pioneers marched in the same hypnotic rhythm toward the peaks of Communist Neverland.”

Always atmospheric and often allegorical, these stories, especially in a second section subtitled “Here and There,” can sometimes seem contrived. In tales set in the U.S., Ifland pokes fun at American-style consumerism, with its well-known excesses, and her take on the classic trope of a young girl attracted to her professor is insightful. But overall, Ifland’s writing about the West seems more distant and abstracted than the self-described “shadow” who portrays in such loving detail a region left behind.

Elegy for a Forgotten World was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in fiction, one of four short-story collections and only two novels. The predominance of short stories in the category is an impressive affirmation of the vigor of the form. Ifland’s approach to storytelling as a “truthful lie” makes for deliciously surprising reading.

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In her first novel, The Colony, poet and playwright Jillian Weise takes the familiar situation of a group of strangers on retreat—did someone say, “writers conference?”—and ups the ethical ante by making genetic defects their reason for being together. Successful applicants to the Colony at Cold Spring Harbor get $5,000 a month plus three months room and board in return for submitting their peculiar DNA for scientific research. They can choose whether to undergo potentially risky treatments while in residency, but the on-site geneticist assumes they’ll jump at the chance to be cured.

Weise explores the moral dimensions of both medical research and human emotions. Anne Hatley, the exuberant heroine of The Colony, is missing a leg due to her faulty gene. Fitted as a child with a prosthesis that enabled her to walk, at age twenty-five she’s content with her computerized artificial leg. For Anne, the colony means time off from work and a chance to relax while watching television and socializing with fellow residents. Soon every colonist but Anne is undergoing treatment, including sweet-talking Nick who has the suicide gene, Leonard (ANK3—bipolar), and Mercedes, who despite having FTO, the fat gene, is extremely thin. Anne tells us, “I walked around the Colony annoyed that I was the only one whose gene manifested itself physically.” She’d just as soon not grow a new leg using her own cells, something the doctors insist is possible given her unique genetic makeup. As the weeks pass, pressure mounts on Anne to get with the program.

The Colony reads as literary realism, but Weise establishes this framework only to deviate sharply from it. Anne’s first-person narration makes way for lists, pseudo-myths, and a hilarious Phone Sex Quiz. Soon Charles Darwin arrives for tête-à-têtes with Anne:

My second week at the Colony, Darwin visited. He wore a top hat and his beard dragged the floor. A trail of sand followed him. He put the soundtrack from The Jazz Singer on the flat screen. I gave him a beer… I sat on the ottoman in front of him and lit a cigarette. We sat there listening to Al Jolson… “You’re ashing in my beer,” he said.

Jillian Weise

When Mercedes’s treatment makes her so buoyant she risks floating up into the sky, we know we’ve entered the territory of magical realism. But Weise moves easily from fantasy into factual material, introducing medical charts, corporate mission statements, even a print of the first X-ray. Brief essays provide relevant background on genetics and its justly maligned predecessor, eugenics, while the narrative sections abound in the specialized knowledge fiction is uniquely capable of delivering. When Anne goes into a convenience store with a friend, the clerk talks to him—as if she weren’t there—about the “hardships” she faces. She describes her techniques for surviving those moments when someone’s casual joke reveals unconscious prejudices against people like her. She tells us how it feels to know, deep in her bones, that these painful situations will recur because even the people she loves best persist in thinking there’s something wrong with her.

Categories come with unspoken assumptions—e.g., Amputees are worse off than the rest of us. But Weise’s novel challenges such received wisdom. Anne hails from Durham, North Carolina; she likes cigarettes, sweet tea, and lacy lingerie. She seems happier with her body than the average woman, confident of her sexual attraction to men, and downright hedonistic in her pursuit of pleasure. Although she has a boyfriend back home and is still smarting over a past affair with a married man, she finds her parents’ advice to “keep your legs closed and your Bible open” hard to follow when suicidal Nick makes a play for her. In scenes with Nick and Anne, every word of dialog, every gesture and descriptive fillip, serves to build the sizzling sense of attraction between these two characters.

Is it fantastic to suppose that gene therapy could prevent suicide, cure obesity, or even regenerate a missing limb? Assuming such treatments are possible, what are their moral and ethical implications? Weise artfully stitches together fiction and fact in a climactic scene featuring (real-life) American philosopher Peter Singer. Through Anne, readers experience what it might be like for a person born with a genetic mutation to hear Singer, who has come to the colony as a guest lecturer, attempt to justify his public statement that “killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.”

As a fictional whole made up of varied textual elements, The Colony succeeds on an ideological level by keeping readers engaged while the author develops her argument. In the best narrative tradition, Weise entertains and involves us right up until her devastating final point is driven home.

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Teaching language arts to middle school students on a Navajo reservation is not for the fainthearted, as Kurt Caswell demonstrates in this probing memoir, In the Sun’s House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation. Caswell, whose essay collection, An Inside Passage, appeared earlier this year, describes driving his pickup truck through a torrent that threatens to wash him over a cliff edge and seeing an angry student take aim at him with a shotgun. When he shows a movie in the school library, boys diddle each other under the tables. But his most harrowing experience is when an eighth-grade girl lowers the school bus window to tell him, “I hate you.” Renee is a bright, diligent student, one of the first Caswell finds himself rooting for. Her words cut so deeply that Caswell “knew then that I didn’t want to teach at all.”

To his credit, Caswell has avoided writing the kind of book that would show readers the sunny road back to optimism from such a dark place of despair and doubt. Quoting Camus—“What gives value to travel is fear”—he invites us along on a journey of more downs than ups. After throwing out his lesson plan, he finds solace in nature, taking long walks through the desert with his dog. He judges himself harshly; and yet, from a disastrous field trip to teaching Romeo and Juliet, we see him begin to connect with students. He connects with readers, too, creating narrative tension through ongoing self-appraisal and close observation of a magical, heartbreaking world few of us will experience first-hand. Descriptive passages augmented by research broaden our understanding of Navajo country, and Caswell’s conversations with not only students, but also his girlfriend and a fellow teacher, deepen our bond with him.

Kurt Caswell

Caswell centers his recollections on concerns about division: a divided America, a divided self. At twenty-six years old, he’s caught between the urge to move on and the allure of home, between ideals of a meaningful education and the reality of failure, between a need for independence and a desire for community. The New Mexico high country is a place of austere beauty, but the lives of impoverished people stuck in tiny villages at the end of rough, sometimes impassable dirt roads seem ugly to Caswell. In his view, students at Borrego Pass School are poor because they lack options; nothing in their lives has prepared them to imagine a future beyond the rez. By comparison, Americans from middle-class backgrounds are wealthy even when they have no money. Racial distinctions become shorthand for this difference: Borrego kids dismiss fellow Navajos as bilagáanas—whites—if they speak English more readily than Navajo and have spent time in cities.

Caswell finds the gulf between him and his students impossibly wide:

This was a violent world, one that stole energy and hope from its people, beat them down, and then kept them down, possibly forever. There must have been something else here too, something soft and caring, something safe and loving, something good that held this community together. If so, I could not, as yet, see it… But why, I had to ask, did I so readily witness the cruel and violent face of Borrego, and nothing of the other side? Why would a community like this one show me, a stranger, this dark part of itself, and hide its best qualities?

In the Sun’s House never answers those questions directly, but Caswell gives hints of reconciliation. There’s the time a local man, recognizing him as a teacher from the school, shows him a hidden corn cache, a Chaco ruin that’s probably 800 years old. Renee writes a good paper and then follows Caswell’s advice when he tells her how she can make it better. Typically, the Borrego kids add an “s” to English words, saying “laters” for good-bye and “for really reals”—just once, Caswell shows himself in conversation saying, “Yeah, for reals.” It’s a nice moment, and all too easy to overlook—like a flower in the desert.

At year’s end, Caswell walks into the desert intending to return some Anasazi potsherds he’s picked up on his rambles. He wonders why he’s leaving Borrego (for a new job teaching at a private boarding school), but he feels ready to go. He sets some pieces on the ground, asking himself if he’s ever really seen them; certain details in the pottery have escaped his notice until that moment. With characteristic honesty, he confesses to a last-minute decision to keep the biggest, most beautiful pieces for himself. In the Sun’s House is full of such admissions—and for me, that was his secret to erasing the distance between reader and author.

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