The World of a Few Minutes Ago: Stories

The emotionally or physically absent parents in the 10 stories of Driscoll's new, quietly lovely story collection work in restaurants and slaughterhouses, live in doublewides, and spend their free time pounding beers. The children they leave in their wake, trapped and perpetually longing, listlessly inhabit northern Michigan where there are three seasons%E2%80%94"July, August, and winter." In "The Dangerous Lay of the Land," fatherless 17-year-old Geneva yearns for college, but she can't imagine anywhere else actually existing, feeling "[a]s if every dream or road or river doubled back on itself and ended up right here in the trailer park." Alden, the protagonist of "Wonder," has never recovered from his father's unexpected death several decades prior, and has lived most recently in prison, racking up "an unending tabulation of regrets." In "Saint Ours," Charlene St. Ours recalls her mother%E2%80%94having been abandoned by her husband%E2%80%94sitting for hours in the Cutlass Supreme (cars are shorthand for character here), "her entire wardrobe...a fashion statement about gravity and early middle age and being suddenly single again and with nowhere to go." Driscoll, (Wanting Only to Be Heard) a poet, is marvelously adept with language, but he occasionally overdoes it. Given a choice between beauty and clarity, he sometimes chooses the former at the expense of the latter. But given that these stories dwell often in the fickle realm of memory, perhaps Driscoll can be forgiven. (Feb.)