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Book Review : Disorder, Sorrow in an Unfeeling World

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Dreams of Distant Lives by Lee K. Abbott (The Putnam Group: $18.95, 208 pages)

Ten stories here, ranging in time from 1963 to some moment in the apocalyptic future. The place is mostly New Mexico, and a sense of these stories can be gained by a head count of certain words: At least four bad knees in these tales; at least six country clubs. No matter the various narrators, they employ the word hereabouts nine times; no matter their social stations, they think of--or play--golf in at least 13 instances, and, not counting the first story here, “The View of Me From Mars,” that red and canaled planet is evoked at least seven times.

Golf. Mars. The New Mexican Desert. “Boys” who drive and sell Buicks and Chevies and stick hereabouts into every possible ellipsis in their conversations. Men and women who dress in peach and magenta polyester, and ruin their knees on their golf swing. Poor sad folk who mess up in so many ways they can’t count them; folk for whom “The point of first love is to hurt us, deeply and permanently,” for whom “certain knowledge . . . has to do with pain and the wrecks we humans are because of it.”

According to the author, we come into this world with insufficient information; commit deeds we don’t know enough to take responsibility for or even perform correctly, and then spend the rest of our lives as miserable as wounded beasts, trying to get our lives back on track with remarkably little success. We are moral morons: Our best doesn’t ever begin to be good enough. In “The View of Me From Mars,” a minister who thinks right, votes right, looks right, but who has been committing adultery with a capital A, is put in the singularly embarrassing position of hoping his adolescent son will “cover for him.”

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What comes after an adulterous marriage gone wrong, is, of course, divorce: “The Happy Parts” and “Dreams of Distant Lives” focus on an existence so lonely, so devoid of human kindness, that words almost fail to express it. These men who sell American cars and dream of the golf green are, or have become, entirely alien from what we may think of as human experience: They are gadgets , mostly, made of “hooks and hasps and snaps.” And as gadgets, they have become unclasped, unstuck.

The women, let it be said, are no picnic either. In “Once Upon a Time,” the wife, now a Republican state senator, has been keeping score on her bumbling, unfeeling husband, not just since he confessed his first infidelity, but since he ran over her cute little dog. “Were I to fail her again,” this bereft and lonely husband confides, “in a month or a year or even 10 years, I was finished.” Of course he does, and he is.

And in “Driving His Buick Home” a hapless unemployed sad-sack of a stepson embarks on a mercy-visit to his broken-down stepdad whose wife (the stepson’s mother) has abandoned him to go and live in Reno with a faro dealer. The stepson’s own wife has one foot out the door, and the two men--with nothing in common except extreme unease and two broken hearts--keep each other pathetic company.

Weird Days of Vietnam

Why have things on Earth come to such a pretty pass? The author devotes three stories to reminding us why: To my mind, two are the weakest and the third the strongest of the collection. In “Why I Live in Hanoi” a half-out-of-his-mind ex-serviceman recalls the weird days of Vietnam. Not just the war, not what anyone might think, but a silly nightmare, a psychedelic mind game.

In “The Era of Great Numbers,” the whole world has turned into something like the New Mexican Desert: Mutants play brutish football and are tortured by their coaches, while crazy ghosts of the intellectual life remain floating through the collective conscious and unconscious of an atom-bombed civilization, as dazzling in their power to destroy as a helium balloon caught in power lines.

But “1963” says it all, and if it’s been said before, there’s no harm in repeating this sad material in a new and cogent way. After 1945, after the Bomb, this planet became a dead and dying place. Our souls, the smartest part of us, have died before our bodies. Meaning has left the Earth. So, in 1963, when the son and daughter of two military families meet outside the White Sands Provings Grounds, even if they were to love each other, they cannot love each other, which is why the boy’s mother gets drunk and throws wishbones at the family clock, why the boy “breaks and enters” his true love’s house, why the girl, after they make love, steals his brother’s bike.

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Only crimes have feelings still attached: The rest is going through the motions, waiting for the mutant football match.

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