May You Live in Interesting Times

Winner of the 1995 Iowa Short Fiction Award, this first collection displays an unmistakable, if uneven, talent. The best pieces here are those in which Gluck ties her very voice-conscious prose to characters with concrete attributes. Among these is ``Bill Hilgendorff,'' in which Nina, the narrator, tells a story of her unrequited love for Bill-a love that began in the ninth grade and ended, sort of, when Bill fell off a mountain in Taiwan (then called Formosa, a word Nina can't get out of her head). Less successful are the more amorphous stories, like ``Gone Fishing,'' in which a nameless narrator tells of an e-mail romance she has with a man in Africa and is not amused when, after the relationship withers, a friend tells her that there are other fish in the sea. Most of these short fictions are primarily about neither character nor story: they are nonlinear in form and, while deadpan ironic in tone, nevertheless have a clearly lyrical intent. The title story, named after a famous Chinese curse, is narrated by an unnamed New York professional woman, a single mother with a daughter and two cats, who reflects fragmentarily on her trips to Asia, a novel by Paul Auster and some of her past lovers. Like many of the narrators here, she feeds the reader a great deal of minutiae, all of which feints in the direction of a deeper truth about her character without ever naming or confronting that truth. The shortcomings of her voice point up the limitations of this collection: while Gluck has a terrific ear for rhythm and meter and pays scrupulous attention to language, these stories too often mistake evasion for indirection, shunning a fuller exploration of character or idea and settling, instead, for the transient pleasures of poetic affect. (Oct.)