Creek Walk and Other Stories

Like Grace Paley, Giles writes exquisitely voice-driven stories that bring arch humor to the social and interior lives of her characters, who are mostly women. In her second collection of stories (her first, Rough Translations, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer), Giles captures the exasperation of women-especially their frustration over not being fully known by others and, sometimes, even themselves. The short, hilarious ""The Writers' Model"" serves not only as a funny indictment of male obtuseness but also as an aesthetic statement about literature's ultimate inability to capture the fullness of character. The female narrator serves as an artist's model for a group of male writers who, pursuing the grail of realism, ask her questions. ""The men were lonely and ignorant, but they were educable, I thought, and I took pride in helping them, however slightly, understand others."" But she soon learns better: ""The writers' questions began to tire me-that same one, week after week, about the underpants-and I decided to quit before I became what they saw."" Giles distills all the irony of real life into remarkably clean and fluid prose. But unlike the plodding scribes of ""The Writers' Model,"" she fully understands that her portraits, for all their clarity and definition, are not definitive. It's that comprehension of limits that, paradoxically, frees Giles to write aggressively. Because she knows she can't pin truths about character or society down permanently, she's not afraid to pin them down long enough for us to get a good, revealing look. (Feb.)