Jealous-Hearted Me: Stories

In her fourth collection, Packer (The Women Who Walk, 1989), professor emeritus at Stanford University and former director of its Creative Writing Center, offers nine plainspoken, warmhearted and wryly observed stories. The individual entries are so closely connected we might be reading a novel. In the title tale, a prevailing motif of rivalryDsibling and otherwiseDis set in place, featuring Jean, the 40-ish mother of two grown children and wife of Lloyd, a successful businessman in Montgomery, Ala. When her father dies, Jean expectsDfinallyDto win her crusty mother's esteem by taking her to live with them. She is crushed when Momma prefers to remain at home in Birmingham with Nina, a hired companion. Jean triumphs in the end, however, when the wily Nina turns out to have feet of clay. The remaining stories deal in engaging detail with the ironies of an often-childlike daughter parenting her parent. The classic struggle between the generations is brilliantly illuminated as lost love, letting go of grandchildren, race relations, religion, moral enlightenment, economic progress and midlife crisis in the New South all come under the burning glass, and mother and daughter learn to coexist in conflictDand in concert. While all the stories move rather leisurely, they sparkle with wit and irony. The concluding story, Vim, is a charmer that leaves the reader overflowing with certainty that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. (Feb.)