Blue Velvet Lite

The gloaming. A Scottish word for dusk, the hour of “the first lightning bug, the first star . . . a beautiful time because for a few moments the purple light made the whole world look like the Scottish highlands on a summer night.” “In the Gloaming,” the title tale of Alice Elliott Dark’s second book of short stories, follows the slow ebb of 33-year-old Laird as the final stages of AIDS carry him into night.

First published in The New Yorker, and later anthologized by John Updike in “The Best American Short Stories of the Century,” “In the Gloaming” spawned not one but two film adaptations. This combination of literary and popular success is certainly a cause for celebration, like the formula for the perfect martini. But as one reads further into this and the other stories of this latest collection, there is something disquieting about the mixture. The layers of the cocktail lie flat, unshaken. The reader is apt, in the midst of a sip redolent with Virginia Woolf, to be hit with a shot of rotgut tasting of celluloid and cathode ray tube.

Although Laird is the one dying, the heroine of his story is his mother Janet. Janet, like many of Dark’s heroines, is a housewife living in Wynemoor, N.J., a well-heeled asteroid in the orbit of both New York and Philadelphia. She has a husband, Martin, “an ambitious, competitive, self-absorbed man who probably should never have gotten married,” a daughter Anne, who is “brave and chipper during her visits” to her brother.

Though descriptions such as these might appear in a TV script in italics as rough character descriptions the actors might quickly ignore at a wink from the director, in Dark’s short story they are all we get: a few blurry shadows in the twilight. As for Janet herself, aside from knitting sweaters for her grandchildren, she has nothing much else to do but look after her dying son. Her personal discoveries have been few and mundane. “Some years earlier, when she was secretly seeing a doctor--a psychiatrist--she had finally admitted to herself that Martin was never going to be the lover she had dreamed of. . . . It was such a relief to be able to face it that she had wanted to share the news with her children, only to discover that they were dependent on the myth.” But the present-day epiphany around which Janet’s story turns is even more of a case study in sudsy melodrama, presented with an organ sting followed by a glissando of perfumed alliteration. “Suddenly she realized--Laird was the love of her life.”

This is doubly unfortunate. Dark is clearly a writer with a knack for moving a reader from sentence to sentence--an essential and undervalued talent. And the notion of a woman discovering herself late in the day, in the act of caring for her dying son, is undeniably fertile. Yet rather than digging for original insights or expanding with unusual detail, Dark trowels the obvious and the commercial onto her characters. The disease that is killing Laird, for example, has been loaded with so much literary and cinematic baggage over the last decade that it is almost impossible to see the patient beneath the disease. Ditto for the suburban housewife and mother who watched her grown children “from a distance, usually from the kitchen as she prepared them a snack reminiscent of their childhood, like watermelon boats or lemonade” and her alienated, absent husband. In “the last moment of the gloaming, the last moment of the day her son died,” Martin speaks to Janet “in a tone she used to hear on those long-ago nights when he rarely got home until after the children were in bed and he relied on her to fill him in on what they’d done that day. . . . ‘Please, Janet, tell me--what else did our boy like?’ ”

Ozzie and Harriet are dead. John Updike himself, assisted by the likes of John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Ford, not to mention playwrights from Eugene O’Neill through Edward Albee and Robert Auletta, have long since dug up the front lawns of the American dreams and replanted them with rich varietals, from irony to absurdity to dirty realism. At the top of the 21st century, a writer with Dark’s talents and ambitions has a duty to stir up something with a little more moxie than a Virgin Mary.

The rest of Dark’s stories come in a variety of other watery flavors: “The Tower” follows a prissy, Jamesian bachelor into his first real bout with Cupid, only to find--gasp--that the obscure object of his desire just might be his daughter. “Dreadful Language” reveals that, even if Wynemoor matrons can’t strive for the high aesthetics of a life lived by silence, exile and cunning, they may nevertheless feel “Regret. Shame. Loneliness.” In “The Jungle Lodge,” Abby, a college sophomore, discovers that men are not only beastly but bestial. “The Secret Spot” transplants Edith Wharton’s masterpiece on adultery, “Roman Fever,” from Rome’s Forum to Central Park’s Strawberry Fields and then twists on a few new vines that virtually strangle any sense from the story.

Other fashionable cue-cards--Sisterhood, a little more male adultery, Alzheimer’s and, to frame the collection, a final story about death--round off a collection of themes that could easily be shuffled around a poker table of movie-of-the-week writers. One would hope that those writers would then reach into their hip pockets and add a splash or two of their favorite hooch. Earnest as these stories are, they lack fire, humor, wisdom, life. In 10 tableaux, Dark hopes to sculpt a living theater of Wynemoor populated by pulsating, passionate humans. Instead, she has created little more than 10 Flags Over New Jersey, a two-dimensional theme park and a wax museum.

Dark stands, not in the gloaming with the three Graces of suburbanity--Updike, Cheever and Ford--where the bitterness of the gin and the palliative of the vermouth mix into perfect stories, but in the striped twilight of a black and white TV screen, drinking in alternating sips the self-consciously literary and the frankly commercial. One can only hope that her success with Updike and Hollywood will encourage her to toast the new millennium with harder stuff.