House Fires

The 11 stories in Reisman's low-key debut collection, winner of the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award, are set everywhere from 1948 Buffalo to 1981 San Francisco and feature emotionally needy characters dealing with loss, unrequited desire and self-discovery, most often against the backdrop of a carefully detailed domesticity. Two sections contain tales linked by their protagonists (""Buffalo Series,"" ""Jessie Stories""), and another holds more loosely grouped narratives (""Northeast Corridor""); these stories are constructed out of short scenes layered to suggest a whole. In the stand-alone title story, a chronicle of the aftereffects of a family death, tormented Amy credits the fire that claimed her adult sister with ""dismantling"" her family: ""one by one we shorted out."" By examining her parents' and her own reactions to the tragedy, she puzzles out the essence of their common existence. ""Dreaming of the Snail Life,"" in the ""Northeast Corridor"" section, presents a rather static sketch of a woman at loose ends in urban Providence. Lovesick, jealous, vicious and alone, the best she can do is to imagine ""someplace else."" By contrast, the dazzling ""Confessions,"" in ""Buffalo Series,"" showcases Reisman's gift for dialogue in an intimate, affecting portrait of a man newly returned from WWII with his new European wife, who must explain his marriage to the man he still loves. In the intergenerational ""The Good Life,"" one of the ""Jessie Stories,"" Reisman celebrates the comforting power of small gestures as Jessie's mother comes to terms with her 24-year-old daughter's lesbianism and her own mother's senility. Though Reisman sometimes fails to infuse her familiar themes with a truly original twist, the tender vulnerability she exposes in her characters gives this earnest collection heart. (Oct.)