FIRST FICTION

The Music of

Your Life

John Rowell

Simon & Schuster:

260 pp., $24

The stories of John Rowell’s crafty first collection, each of which combines the antithetical qualities of weighty novella and zippy teleplay, aren’t really all about the same thing. Rather, they’re all about several things, and, as we move from story to story, the way Rowell revisits and reconfigures his pet themes over and over draws us further and further into “The Music of Your Life.” It’s the way, say, a popular Golden Age television series like “The Lawrence Welk Show” used to feature regular performers and the same old chestnuts week to week, to give viewers a sense of continuity and familiarity. By the end of this collection (whose title story, by the way, is about a fifth-grader who’s obsessed with Lawrence Welk), we’re thoroughly hooked on Rowell’s flair for performance and on a cast of narrators who all seem, suspiciously, like the same person: They’re gay, they grew up in the South, they’re besotted with show biz, they have a discerning eye for baby boom kitsch (Rocky and Bullwinkle nightlight, Underdog PJs) and they’re caught up in how their middle-aged selves have sprung from the children they once were.

Although the young North Carolinian of “The Music of Your Life” has no idea how he’ll turn out, we do: Lawrence Welk is his improbable introduction to glamour, and although his father attempts to nudge him in the direction of the baseball diamond, he prefers to leaf through Photoplay, drink ginger ale from a champagne glass and ask his mother stagy questions, like “Madam, is there any caviar in the house?” In “Who Loves You?” a Connecticut florist recalls growing up in Alabama, moving to Hollywood and being talked into appearing on “I Love Lucy” (by Lucille Ball herself) in drag. “Spectators” tells of a movie critic’s coming-of-age through his life-defining encounters with three landmark films: “Mary Poppins,” “Cabaret” and “Cruising.” And “Delegates” finds three weekenders taking in a summer stock production of “1776” and partying afterward with the attractive, and alarmingly young, cast: “[T]he real Continental Congress of 1776 would hardly recognize themselves coming out of the stage door, these young men who are ... belting out things like “See you tomorrow, girlfriend.’ ”

“The Music of Your Life” is David Sedaris meets Raymond Carver. It’s touching and funny and odd and just a wee bit camp. And, like any good nostalgia, it’s as bubbly as it is bittersweet.

*

Stillness

Courtney Angela Brkic

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

208 pp., $23

Toward the end of this haunting collection of stories from Courtney Angela Brkic, a nameless narrator, driven underground by incessant shelling during the war in Yugoslavia, tells us, “I was a writer once, although I do not remember whether I wrote fiction or fact.” Brkic was a forensic researcher in Bosnia in 1996, and you get the sense, reading “Stillness,” of a melding of the real and the imagined, of artful reportage and of an accumulation of remembered anecdotes and episodes straining to build a picture of a conflict whose broad outline remains mostly unknown and unfathomable. The men and women who populate these pages -- snipers, shuttle diplomats, mercenaries, amputees, emigres to America, peacekeepers and the disappeared -- also struggle through fractured lives and bombed-out towns to make sense of fate and history.

For the old man searching for his vanished son in “Suspension,” the only sense is obliteration: “A white, foggy space that robs the world of all sound, all feeling. This is where he believes his son exists.” The sniper of “The Angled City,” meanwhile, devises arbitrary rules to fend off the chaos around him: “He does not fire at men in tan coats, red-haired women, or groups of three.” And the narrator of “Canis Lupus” appears to be a wolf pent up in an abandoned zoo, whose troubling story is either a bitter allegory or the desperate survival tactic of yet another civilian victim of a brutal campaign.

As our memory of Kosovo fades, “Stillness” is a fittingly grim reminder, made all the more poignant by its many unanswered questions and dangling story lines. As that nameless writerly narrator tells us, “I am disappearing, like my city. I am fading into the overcast sky.”