In the ten stories of this worthy short story collection, Spatz (No One but Us) explores the complicated, often bewildering emotions behind various forms of love: between fathers and sons, between spouses, between lovers. One beleaguered character rightly protests the facility of such categorizations: "I think it's amazing that we have words like that at all— 'off and on,' 'married,' 'single,' whatever—like the things they refer to are even the least bit comprehensible." The tales, suffused with a gentle melancholy, are driven not by external events, which in most cases are insignificant, but by the characters' memories of loss and their futile search for unfettered affection. At his best, Spatz can subtly and economically depict the erosion or betrayal of love: in "Lisa Picking Cockles," a teenage son feeds private information about his famous artist father to a female reporter. In "Inversion," a woman lies awake with mysterious night sweats, realizing that she no longer wants to be with her husband. A woman asks her boyfriend to describe his final sexual encounter with each of his past lovers in "Anyone's Venus"; the boyfriend insists that last times always have a distinctly different feeling about them, even if you don't realize that it is
the last time. Spatz does an admirable job of portraying his characters' inner lives in expressive but unadorned prose. Though the material isn't new, he avoids cliché and offers some quietly moving, resonant images of emotional push and pull. Agent, Kyung Cho, Henry Dunow. (Sept. 15)
