The Hotel Eden, and Other Stories

Toward the end of ""Keith,"" the second story of the dozen in this funny and poignant collection, one character implores another: ""Make something up."" It's a brief moment, but a telling one. Carlson, a short-story writer (Plan B for the Middle Class) and novelist (Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald) produces clean and assured prose and animates familiar situations with imaginative twists, masterfully reported details and enough emotional honesty to fill a book twice this size. In the beguiling ""A Note on the Type,"" an incarcerated criminal discovers the joy of typeface design. He escapes from prisons not to resume a life of felony but to graffiti the world with his fonts. The narrator of ""Oxygen,"" home for the summer after his first year in college, undergoes a baffling, exciting sexual experience. By the end of the story, he begins to sense just how harrowing this interlude has been, and his insights resonate for the reader. Carlson often crams a whole novel's worth of feeling and ambiguity into a compressed form. The title entry is set in the bar at the Hotel Eden, where the narrator and his girlfriend are seduced simultaneously by a mysterious sophisticate. The irony of the hotel's name is revealed at the end, when the events the narrator has reported are suddenly cast in a new, troublesome light. Carlson's teenagers and amateur typographers, his widows and con men, are still excited by the world. In their race to understand both themselves and the objects of their affection, they spill a lot of words, an extra phrase or overused verb now and again. The occasional ungainly rhythm never distracts; in fact, it's a key part of the integrity of each story. Every character has been caught on the cusp of epiphany, and the imperfect shine to the sentences reveals just how precarious those moments of true revelation can be. First serial to Esquire.(May)