Jack Kerouac is Pregnant: Stories

Sheehan's first book is comprised of 15 short stories that are-without exception-artful yet disappointingly indistinct. In ``The Roller Skating Queen,'' a young woman forgets her troubles (that her child was fathered by her mother's boyfriend, for instance) by spending long hours skating in Central Park. ``The Bone Man'' concerns Scarlett, a Latin American fortune-teller named after the famous southern belle; moving to New York, she finds her father, who abandoned her and her mother when she was a child. A women in ``Twin'' mourns the death of her twin brother in the army. Sheehan's talents are evident but so are her faults: her style leans toward minimalism with chillingly detached imagery-and this isn't as felicitous a combination as it might seem. Because she largely withholds narrative and emotional context, her protagonists melt in the mind into one distraught Uber-character, a young woman struggling through life with troubling relations with men who seem to care only about shaking her off or knocking her up. For all the evident art, there isn't much complexity here. (Oct.)