cover image Interior Design: Stories

Interior Design: Stories

Philip Graham. Scribner Book Company, $19.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-684-80372-2

Novelist (How to Read an Unwritten Language) and short-story writer (The Art of the Knock) Graham fills his newest story collection with a sense of the power of imagination. One by one, his characters tap their own inventive powers to alter the troubling world around them. ""Another Planet"" views the emotional disintegration of a shoe salesman through the haunted eyes of his young son. ""Angel"" begins with a boy's fascination with watchful guardian angels, then comes down to earth to consider how agonizingly difficult it is to communicate the world as we observe it to a lover, a reading audience--or even to an angelic muse. In the title story, a fanciful interior decorator fashions dwellings from her clients' dreams until she falls in love with a man strangely lacking in dreams and attempts to impose her concepts of what his dreams should be. ""Beauty Marks,"" the most effective entry here, chronicles the evolving relationship of a young couple--recently returned from Africa where they were researching their respective doctoral theses--and their growing awareness of the demons they must dispel in order to seal their new marriage. ""The Pose"" depicts an out-of-work factory worker creating a female body out of wire and then hanging his wife's clothes on its limbs; meanwhile, the wife hopes that this fetish will make him see her anew. Quietly engrossing, Graham's stories illustrate the ways our souls, craving meaning, instinctively make patterns out of experience--and that this process, whether heroic or neurotic, is not all that different from the work of an artist. (Dec.)