FICTION

FOLEY’S LUCK by Tom Chiarella . (Alfred A. Knopf: $20; 181 pp.) These 11 stories follow a seemingly representative American named Dan Foley from age 12 in upstate New York, where he first accompanies his undertaker father to retrieve the body of an accident victim, to age 60-plus in Florida, where he visits the children of his broken marriage in shopping malls he helped design during his so-so career as an architect.

An odd thing happens. We consider the first story to be set in the present and are unaware of the world outside Foley changing much as he ages. As a boy Foley seems bright and sensitive, and we expect him to transcend the life around him, but in fact he remains something of a fool. The brightness and sensitivity come from Tom Chiarella’s writing; in the end, they hang on Foley like an ill-fitting coat.

In the title story, Foley fixates neurotically on a string of bad luck that begins when his car kills a fox. Later, his inability to finish household projects drives his wife to divorce him. Still later, he is unreasonably frightened of his daughter’s husband, a self-styled voodoo priest. One can’t be sure whether Chiarella, a young writer, didn’t know how to make Foley grow up, or whether he planned that this collection should have the unsettling implication that it does: that you can live your whole life long and never have a clue.