Cries for Help, Various

Powell (Edisto) has occasionally been pigeonholed as a sort of Southern Donald Barthelme, and it is true that most of the 44 stories collected here can be described as short comic tales with a distinct Dixie swagger. But these stories offer even more, such as the emotional vigor of “Spy,” in which an aging father comes to suspect that his daughter is working for the CIA (“My daughter wears a wire, I a diaper”) or the pathos of “A Local Boy,” in which a rock-bottom loser blames his shortcomings on Sherman’s March. Other stories imagine a grade school friendship between Charles Dickens and Janis Joplin (“Joplin and Dickens”) and take the point of view of a recluse considering investing in a Ukrainian mail-order bride (“The Retarded Hermit”); several (“Wagons, Ho!” and “The New World”) meditate on the settling of America. There’s also a pair of companion pieces to Powell’s The Interrogative Mood (“The Imperative Mood” and ”The Indicative Mood”) and a strange trilogy about Boris Yeltsin. But the best of these stories—and they’re all good—plumb for depth and coax profundity out of the moody detritus of Americana. Powell’s range is matched only by his sense of play, and this book is a skeleton key to an extremely gifted and quintessentially American writer, at home in any form. [em](Sept.) [/em]