In the Sparrow Hills: Stories

This collection of five short stories marks an extraordinary debut for Capouya, the publisher of New Amsterdam Books. Distinctive and powerful, the tales display an unusual sense of form combined with superb storytelling and elegant language. Capouya's themes are betrayal, the impulsive violence of men and the moral uncertainties of life, as reflected in a wide range of settings that draw on his experiences as a merchant seaman during WW II and as a GI in Korea, as well as his membership in New York's literary elite. The tales are consciously desultory collations of anecdotes held together by the thread of the unnamed narrator's memories. In the title story, his search for a sketch thought to have been written by Chekhov leads him to recall his near-insubordination on a steamer bound for Antwerp, and then to ruminate on a waitress's cheap perfume. His wife's recovery from major surgery in ``Staring at the Sun'' triggers thoughts of a dangerous mission near the Leyte Gulf at the end of WW II, and of a later flight over the Pyrenees. Capouya has a strong, quintessentially American voice, redolent with the saltwater tang of sea jargon, that offers the unusual tension of working-class experience recounted in considerably more exalted diction. The result is a cross between Nelson Algren and Henry James, a prose as exhilarating as it is unlikely. Capouya is alert to ``the blind purposes of men,'' profoundly decent in his judgment of his characters and merciless in the narrator's assessment of himself. He is a major new writer whose future books we eagerly await. (Apr.)