At-Risk

This year's winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction is an earnest, straightforward collection of 10 tales set mostly in a poor black neighborhood in Brooklyn that carry a stiff social message. Single and teenage mothers, absent or drug-addicted dads, the token black girl on a scholarship at a fancy private school who gets invited to her classmates' party because she teaches them a dance in the bathroom: Gautier manages to give cookie-cutter characters some dimension. In "The Ease of Living," Jason, 16, is sent to his grandpa's in Tallahassee, Fla., for the summer after two of his Brooklyn pals are shot dead. But it's more punishment than vacation, as Jason and his grandfather must both overcome the preconceptions they hold about each other. Another 16-year-old, a single mom of an infant who won't stop crying, gets almost no help from the father, and never learned from her own mother what intimacy or bonding with a child really means. Gautier's aim is obvious and ultimately forced, and the bland prose can't elevate the book above a series of didactic moral lessons. (Sept.)