Some Possible Solutions

High concepts and sly emotion animate this solid collection of allegorical fiction from the author of And Yet They Were Happy and The Beautiful Bureaucrat. In “The Knowers,” a wife learns the precise date of her death via a kind of morbid ATM, then reluctantly divulges the information to her husband. A young mother moves to a town of eerie look-alikes in “The Doppelgängers,” where she eventually breast-feeds a child that bears an uncanny resemblance to her own. In “The Joined,” the world watches with envy as astronauts physically fuse with an alien race, achieving a blissful mind-body symbiosis not available to humanity. The last two stories are the collection’s best: the narrator of “The Wedding Stairs” finds a life’s worth of embarrassments have manifested as stains on her gown, and in “Contamination Generation,” a father wrestles with inadequacy in the shadow of his neighbor’s mansion. Among the other stories of wifedom and motherhood, this final glimpse into the male psyche offers a feel of the fantastic, of the playfulness and discovery that characterizes the collection as a whole. [em]Agent: Faye Bender, the Book Group. (May) [/em]