Follow Me

Cleverly dramatizing his own wry sense of karmic equilibrium, Griner crafts these 10 memorable stories of American life-set variously in cities, the burbs, the country and an expat stint in Portugal-into a wise, engaging meditation on unpredictability. In the linked first-person narratives ""Clouds"" and ""Grass,"" two aging, very different brothers-one fascinated by clouds, the other by grass-weave bits of their respective expertise into two gently mournful memoirs. ""Nails"" takes this technique further as a doctor makes sense of his life and the untimely death of his son through an encyclopedic knowledge of fingernail pathology. The imaginative title story follows the rise of a Machiavellian avant-garde photographer in New York who hires a PI to follow her. Like the hapless subjects of her earlier exhibitions, she finds herself mysteriously, psychically invaded-even after the detective disappears. Three other linked stories trace the path of troublemaking drifter Bolen from a construction job outside Cleveland to F.T. Worboys's remote Texaco station. Worboys seems the victim when Bolen robs and vandalizes his station and shop; but as Worboys, in turn, sabotages cars to drum up business, his status becomes more complex. Griner's careful prose intensifies an entertaining debut filled with characters motivated by mingled, often contradictory desires. (June)