News from the Volcano: Stories

In her debut volume of five stories, Swan portrays America's troubled desert Southwest. Hers are memorable pictures--though they often strain for significance. These dusty mesas and towns are decidedly ominous, the long highways between them punctuated only by the occasional convenience store. The characters try and often fail to fend off the bleakness of their lives and their landscape. In the title story, a clerk at a small truck stop observes local customers with indifference till nightfall brings her a visitor she can't ignore. In ""Backtracking,"" Jason Hummer comes home to Colorado to settle an inheritance and must confront old worries and old enemies. The middle-aged man in ""Sloan's Daughter"" pursues a common smalltown pastime: bailing his no-good child out of trouble, again and again--until she gets into a pickle he can't resolve. All these stories serve to introduce ""Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn,"" the novella that makes up most of the book. In it, the Goldman family leaves the East Coast in the 1940s to open a furniture store in New Mexico. The town they've picked turns out to be spectacularly ugly; and that's just the start of new troubles for the Goldmans, who have to learn to cope with unfriendly neighbors, ethnic difference, financial traps and an unscrupulous employee. Young Rachel Goldman, the pivot of the tale, grows up to understand the world in small pieces, trying to work out the hidden rules by which the town's kids, teens and adults live. Swan's novella far excels the rest of the volume: in it, she lets her weighty metaphors go, opting instead for a moving look at the dilemmas of a family and of a region. (Aug.)