Moving among the shadows in a new Southwest

Fans of the big-hearted Southwestern writer Ron Carlson will welcome this selection of 33 short stories reprinted from three previous collections now out of print. Carlson’s last new collection, “At the Jim Bridger,” came out a year ago.

The people of his Southwest do not live in the tradition-haunted enclaves of Latinos and Navajo, or in the even more ancient Indian pueblos or the more recent 150-year-old Mormon settlements of Utah and Arizona, although Mormons do make some appearances. Carlson’s people are mostly Anglos, relatively recent arrivals who have been pouring into these warm and once open spaces, filling up cities such as Phoenix, creating a new and less-rooted American type that carries with it no hint of background, just its own shadow.

Carlson’s characters meet for neighborhood cookouts and in bars, and they drive on freeways to get to work and to visit lovers and aging parents. They drink beer at minor-league ballparks. Some teach in colleges, which is what Carlson does now -- at Arizona State University in Tempe.

The men are nice guys, nearly all of them. The women, nearly all of them, are pretty smart -- and some of them are downright wise. Which is why you want to spend time with them, as you can in this book, with its selection of stories from “The News of the World,” “Plan B for the Middle Class” and “The Hotel Eden.” While these are mostly regular folks, not quite regular things happen to them, or they do things slightly out of character. And so there are consequences, some quite unexpected.

In “Olympus Hills,” a guy whose wife hasn’t yet arrived leaves a party early. He sees a deer in the falling snow and asks a girl still at the party to look at it, and when she “went for me, I did nothing to stop her. I had made it outside, leaving early, but that’s all I could do.”

In “Zanduce at Second,” Eddie Zanduce plays third base for the Baltimore Orioles. He has killed 11 people with stray foul balls. And you know something, he actually likes the reputation he has created.

“Oxygen,” Carlson says in his introduction, is a piece he considers a novella. It is a long, hot account of a 19-year-old college student’s long, hot summer in Phoenix, were he makes love every day to the wife of the dying man to whom he delivers oxygen.

When the man had died and he was driving the city’s freeways about to go back to Missoula, he knew he’d “spent the summer as someone else, someone I knew I didn’t care for and I would be glad when he left town. We would see each other from time to time, but I also knew he was no friend of mine. I eased along the empty roadways simply trying to gather what was left, to think, but it was like trying to fold a big blanket alone. I kept having to start over.”

In “Blazo,” Carlson succeeds at something very hard to bring off. He tells a complex tale of how a father’s estranged son, a brilliant man in his middle 20s, flees to the frozen Alaska bush, eventually to die there. What is difficult is not the story of the son, although that is tricky enough, but the grief and bewilderment of the father, which Carlson renders with precise compassion.

Many of the stories are just plain fun, like “The H Street Sledding Record,” in which a man throws manure on his roof on Christmas Eve to persuade his son that the reindeer have come, or “The Governor’s Ball,” in which a mattress flies off a truck heading toward the dump on an elevated freeway.

Carlson really lost a mattress that way. It reminds one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s reason for putting a parrot atop a door in “Love in the Time of Cholera” -- because as he was writing, he said to his wife, “Where is the parrot?” and she replied, “On top of the door.” So into the novel went the parrot.

Carlson’s stories are full of parrots and other happily found bits of life.