What She Left Me

Winner of Bread Loaf's 1998 Bakeless Prize for Fiction, this collection of nine stories and a novella situates diverse characters in hard times, but supports them with an engaging tenderness and a succor of edgy humor. In ""Crooks,"" Ceil is a bright teenage girl with thieving, pistol-toting bad-boy companions who lust after another girl, Jody. Ceil rebels not by merely defying her parents, but by mapping an odd, poignant course of self-destruction, sabotage and vulnerability amid her peers. She takes condoms out of Jody's wallet and pokes them full of pinholes, and sweet-talks a grungy biker out of his knife, with which she cuts herself. A sense of menace builds throughout the story, underscoring the narrator's sharp observations about her companions and herself. Other tales offer a young couple's melancholy adventures in Las Vegas (""The Money Stays, the People Go"") and an inexperienced woman making an awkward debut on Chicago's lesbian dating scene (""Incognito""). In ""The Whole Numbers of Families,"" another lesbian character, whose relationship with her lover is foundering, clarifies her sense of family while visiting her dying aunt. The title story, while frank and polished, at times feels too studied, too neatly arranged; the heroine's breakdown predictably parallels her mother's disturbing legacy. The novella, ""God of Gods,"" is a moving meditation featuring a six-foot-six butcher in a Chicago supermarket, Odin Tollefson, and his fraught coming-out as a gay man in the midst of the racial upheavals of the early 1970s. Elegantly contextualizing Odin's sensitive, tentative coming to terms with his sexuality within a gritty, working-class urban setting, the narrative offers a respectful, finely tuned perspective on blue-collar gay life. This novella, like the strongest of Doenges's other tales, sturdily depicts identity struggles in which the characters' inner lives are given as much tough contemplation as their surroundings. (Aug.)