cover image What We Come in for

What We Come in for

Richard Lundquist. University of Missouri Press, $19.95 (176pp) ISBN 978-0-8262-1270-2

All of the 22 stories in Lundquist's enjoyable collection center around the fictional American heartland town of Paradise. Throughout, Lundquist displays a notable ability to focus directly on the hardest moments in his characters' lives without flinching and without sentimentality. His best stories are the ones in which he confronts the lonely tragedy of life and his characters' inability to find lasting comfort. In ""When the Blood Came Faster Than the Water,"" the protagonist remembers his friend's gruesome death in battle. ""There were two of 'em, almost,"" Gil tells another soldier in Paradise's local bar. ""There was another head and other arms and a torso wrapped up against his chest... and it wasn't until we pried them apart and lay him down we could see it was just the top half of 'im because where his legs should a been, there was only shreds of bloodied cloth.... "" In ""The Visitation,"" a son steals his mother's body from the funeral home after finding among her discarded recipe cards a secret diary of a long-past love affair. Lundquist experiments with several different protagonists (a solitary teenage girl, a bored teenage boy, a wife finding small solace in the new minister's arms), many of whom play cameo roles in other stories, and all of whom share a keen sense of solitude and a desperate desire for connection. But if many of the entries are strong, the collection as a whole doesn't showcase them to their best advantage. Short, distracting allegorical vignettes inserted between stories rely heavily on simile (""Slug, intransigent as a tree stump... "") and evoke place while neglecting plot. Nevertheless, the best tales delve deep into human nature, illuminating its darkest impulses and noblest inclinations. (May)