FICTION

PRIVATE PROPERTY by Debra Jo Immergut (Turtle Bay Books: $20; 211 pp.) . Immergut’s stories are as addictive as the drugs that one of her characters numbly accepts from a pharmaceuticals rep who otherwise bores her--a set of hard, sad ideas that hold the reader in something like a hypnotic trance. There is a point, in a story called “Frozen Niagara,” where any reader who has been paying attention will suddenly understand that suicide is no more than two pages away. Yet there is something about the author’s sprung rhythm that makes you read even more quickly, hoping against hope that the assumption is merely a mark of your own predictability. When the expected does happen, it happens unexpectedly, at the wrong moment, so that the awfulness of it is unavoidable. The narrator in “River Road,” who had kicked drugs once before, until a chance meeting with her father’s friend makes them too available, seems until the surprise moment of a kiss to be the sort who would shun the older man--but there is no sadness, no emptiness too devastating for Immergut to consider, and display. Her stories are painful to read; the range of dysfunctional relationships she can conjure up are depressing. What makes them difficult to put down is an urgency. Her spare prose is a warning--despair is only a few clumsy emotions away.