BOOK REVIEW : Compassionate Tales of Behavior Under Stress

The Expendables by Antonya Nelson (University of Georgia Press: $15.95; 200 pages)

“The Listener,” the first story in this fine collection, explores the exquisitely delicate relationship of a sighted woman to her blind husband. Julia and Averil have recently moved to Chicago from Kansas and haven’t yet become accustomed to the differences between urban and rural living, though Averil is adjusting more quickly than Julia.

In Kansas, their lives somehow seemed more natural; here in the city, she’s begun to wonder at her motives for marrying Averil--”a man unlike other men, one who followed her lead without having a real choice.”

Such thoughts seldom intruded on their bliss in Kansas, where the remoteness of the farm would have made social life difficult for any couple.

In the city, where everyone is constantly surrounded by neighbors and colleagues, “a lone soul stood out,” and for the first time, Julia feels that her life is no longer happily private, but eccentrically lonely. With some misgivings, she invites her assistant to the apartment for dessert, an event that precipitates a crisis in the fragile fabric of the marriage.

“Maggie’s Baby” explores the issue of teen-age parenthood from an unexpected and highly individual perspective.

Like the other stories in the book, the fundamental situation is straightforward, the treatment refreshingly oblique.

The title story also takes place during a wedding, an occasion ideally suited to the author’s fascination with behavior under emotional stress.

This time the narrator is a teen-age boy whose sister is marrying a fellow suspected of mob connections, and with good reason.

“Only a month ago, Chris had sold one of my brothers a Cadillac for a song. Mint condition, 1964, black interior of leather. Well, not quite mint; there were the holes along the side--bullet holes or repair holes, depending on who told the story.”

In “The Expendables,” the ratio of dark to light seems weighted in favor of the storyteller’s flippant irony, until you start to brood about what he’s trying to express with his notion of human expendability.

“Helen in Hollywood” invites you into the bedroom and into the mind of an alcoholic at 3 in the morning.

Like all members of AA in good standing, Helen has a phone number to call if she finds herself backsliding, though this particular number belongs to a woman who lives on Laguna Beach, and who “sometimes walked straight into the surf when she felt like drinking, diamonds, furs, whatever and all, straight into the waves.”

That solution doesn’t have much relevance to Helen, trapped in her stuffy Hollywood apartment. Still, she calls it, only to get a hang-up from that woman’s angry husband.

Helen then assumes the role of counselor to herself, not only letting us in on the causes of her despair, but incidentally treating us to a succinct analysis of the methods of AA itself.

Two of the dozen stories here deal with a single set of characters: a family attempting to come to terms with the death of a daughter in an explicable motorcycle accident.

Compassionate and excruciatingly realistic, they demonstrate the extensive range of Nelson’s talent and her remarkable ability to find the small, mundane detail to relieve but not violate the essential pathos of her material.

The first, “Mud Season,” is told from the vantage point of the victim’s mother; the second, “Looking for Tower Hall,” from the somewhat more detached perspective of a son-in-law, the husband of surviving sister Tina.

Here the tragedy has begun to slide into the background, but not entirely.

Though the narrator tells Tina that she’s now part of a new family, he realizes he’s merely reminding her “she is really more a member of another, more complex and scarred one,” and that despite all his sensitivity and good intentions, he “will always be on the outside, away from the ignition heat of her family” and its unique history.

Such special circumstances are Nelson’s central theme, and she finds the precisely appropriate tone for each set.

Thursday: Jonathan Kirsch reviews Karen Lystra, “Searching the Heart.”