The Importance of High Places: Stories and a Novella

The four short stories in this debut collection delight, while the one novella disappoints, often for the same reasons. While a certain deftly handled opaqueness adds layers to the stories, the same quality obfuscates the meaning of the novella. In one story a man who has had scant pleasure in life buys a faded dinosaur theme park and works at restoring it, with little success. Other stories tell of an aging man who subtly courts a Polish widow by bringing her his curtains every week to launder, and of an opera-singing quarry worker whose wife has recently left him and who cares for his elderly aunt and does nonsensical things, like purchasing a pair of eels from a disreputable-looking couple in a bar. These quirky actions add up to very individual portraits of the characters and their conditions, but in the novella--the tale of a priest living in Hawaii--the episodes go on longer while measuring up to less. About half of the novella consists of an old priest's confessional letter to his successor, and the priest's self-conscious writing is much less gripping than Higgins's own delicate prose. (Mar.)