Sleeping Mask

LaSalle’s languorous story collection rarely engages the reader’s attention fully. Despite the book’s Borges epigraph, fans of the Argentine master will find the imitations in “Southern Majestic Zone” and “Boys: A New African Fable” lacking. Rather than getting readers to buy into its Orwellian conceit, the former never convinces, and both stories tend toward whimsically simplistic voices. The personal histories are better, with moments of nostalgia obscured by unfortunate narrative choices, as in “The Flight,” where the sudden disappearance of a plane full of people manages to have less significance than the baseball glove the speaker once bought for his son, and “A Late Afternoon Swim,” in which the narrator’s recollection of a swimming excursion with his mother is undercut by an exhausting description of the French dictionary that she may have had in her bag that day. A literature professor’s fairly successful date (“A Day in the Life of the Illness”) is pleasant and the standout of the collection. (Jan.)