FICTION

FIELD NOTES: Stories by Barry Lopez. (Knopf: $20; 158 pp.) All of the characters in these 12 stories bear an odd resemblance to the spirit of the caribou in “Pearyland,” in which a young scientist “camps in the land of the dead.” None of their feet actually touch the ground. James Teal, the hermit in whom the narrator sees a stillness he has never seen in a human, “an unbroken grace.” Or the spinster Empira Larson, who tells the narrator that he is “the custodian” of his stories; spends her whole life making a beautiful tapestry and wears it as she walks into the river. Or the graceful, elusive character in “The Negro in the Kitchen,” who appears, impeccably mannered and dressed, in the narrator’s kitchen one morning on his walk across the country (he wants to become an “African-American indigene”). Or my favorite, “Sonora,” the story of a scientist who studies the formation of dunes in southern Egypt, and is given the time and money to study some dunes on the Sonora coast south of Cabo Tepoca by a Mexican businessman.

The heart of this story is the scientist’s anguished loneliness, his sensuality bound so tightly to love and familiarity that he cannot assuage his loneliness with mere companionship. In many of these stories, also, the narrator exorcises his or her practical, scientific, incredulous self to levitate, if only briefly, over the ground.