In this taut, focused collection, veteran short story writer Carlson (The Hotel Eden) captures the ordinary occurrences that define our lives. Sharing graceful, unadorned prose and elegant metaphors, the nine stories and two brief sketches collected here portray characters at moments when the solid ground of reality slips out from under them. High school figures prominently: for Carlson, the teenage years offer the perfect transitional moments, when minor incidents are writ large. Fortunately, he depicts these mundane experiences—a boy's first date ("The Potato Gun"), his first fistfight ("At Copper View"), his first car ("The Ordinary Son")—with neither condescension nor irony, but a mixture of serious reflection and naïve wonder. In "The Ordinary Son," Reed's average intelligence in a family of geniuses makes him its only distinctive member; he amazes his young brother, who is practicing quantum physics with crayons, with the simple pleasure of his brand-new car. Elsewhere, the teenager's unique sense of alienation is a chronic condition: in "Towel Season," Edison's absorbing interest in a highly theoretical engineering project separates him from the neighborhood husbands and wives; in the title story, Donner's recounting of a near-death incident on a camping trip leads to a brief connection between him and a woman who is not his wife. With a precision and consistency rarely achieved in similar collections, this volume should earn Carlson continued, well-deserved recognition. National advertising; author tour. (May)
Forecast:Readers will be acquainted with Carlson's name from his appearances in
Esquire and
Harper's, not to mention O. Henry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Blurbs by heavy hitters like John Irving and Michael Cunningham will help to entice browsers.
