The four novellas in this collection by Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, etc.) divide neatly into stylistic halves. The first two, "The Practical Heart" and "Preservation News," are written with an almost Jamesian attention to the semaphore of implications and elided emotions that mediate social pretenses. "The Practical Heart," which tells how the narrator's great-aunt Muriel Fraser came to be painted by John Singer Sargent, first builds a story, then deconstructs it. The story is foregrounded in the collapse of the Fraser family's Scottish fortune, which maroons the clan in Chicago, where Muriel goes from being a pampered heiress to a piano teacher. But the second chapter in this story takes us behind the scenes of the fiction, showing how Muriel, a stubborn, fragile woman, became her nephew-narrator's first guide to life outside of parochial Falls, N.C. In "Preservation News," Mary Ellen Broadfield, an 81-year-old woman of quality in Falls, writes the obituary of Tad Worth, the moving spirit behind the local preservationist scene. Openly gay, martini-loving, gossipy and unkempt, Worth carved a space for himself in Falls that would have been unimaginable in an earlier era. The next two stories, written in a more freewheeling style, inhabit the dark side of that earlier era. "He's One, Too," tells of the ruin of a local businessman, Dan R., caught feeling up a 15-year-old boy in a rest-room setup in Raleigh. "Saint Monster" is a memoir of Clyde Melvin Delman Sr. by his son. Clyde, an ugly, much cuckolded salesman, spent his life passing as white. Although the first two novellas are beautifully realized, the last two are needier texts, requiring an empathy on the reader's part that they don't quite merit. 14-city author tour.(Oct. 4)
