Some shrewd but subtle observations about family

If, as critic A. Alvarez maintains, voice is the essence of good writing, Merrill Joan Gerber has a voice that is hard to forget: forceful, unvarnished, at times even vehement, a lot like Philip Roth’s. Although Gerber may lack Roth’s outrageous sense of humor, his sheer inventiveness and his free-ranging engagement with politics, society and culture, she is capable of the same kind of emotional intensity and raw power. And, when it comes to depicting the nuances of personal relationships, she can be shrewder, subtler and more telling.

Indeed, few modern writers can match Gerber’s portrayal of the strains, embarrassments and satisfactions of family life, the subject that has inspired her best work for the last four decades in novels such as “An Antique Man” and “King of the World” and in the many short stories she has written. Her latest story collection, “This Is a Voice From Your Past,” offers a representative baker’s dozen, some new, some previously published. Creative-writing teachers constantly tell students to write about what they know. Gerber certainly exemplifies this approach, and many of the stories in this collection demonstrate her gift for transforming personal experience into art.

Originally published in the New Yorker, “We Know That Your Hearts Are Heavy” is narrated in the first person by Gerber’s longtime fictional alter ego Janet, who in this story is still a recent newlywed living in Boston with her husband, Danny, a graduate student. Janet’s favorite uncle has died, but her parents don’t want her to go to the funeral. Tired of being sheltered by them, she insists. She is surprised, however, indeed “shocked,” when Danny volunteers to come with her: “I had been imagining this as a private family affair. Danny does not like families, and he will not like mine. None of them are the kind of people we would have for friends, but I feel for them something akin to love, which makes them bearable, while Danny has no reason at all (except that I am his wife) to be tolerant of their crudities and illiteracies.”

In “Latitude” we meet the formidable in-laws of a Janet-and-Danny-like couple called Martha and Will. Although narrated in the third person, it is every bit as revealing. Gerber is superb at portraying characters in the grip of crude, harsh emotions, as in Martha’s memory of how bitterly Will’s parents had opposed their engagement:

“His mother had turned purple. ‘What right have you to ruin my son’s life? Who do you think you are, trying to make a boy into a man. He’s still a baby. Look at her!’ she cried to her husband. ‘Look how she holds his hand! Look at them!’ ”

The raw stuff of fiction

She is just as adept at portraying the subtlest of intimacies, as in this scene, where the now-peaceable in-laws are at Will and Martha’s for dinner, watching Ed Sullivan and playing with their new granddaughter: “[Martha] caught Will looking over his paper at her, and when their eyes met he winked, and then, embarrassed, glanced uncomfortably around the room to make sure that no one had seen him.”

Sometimes, even Gerber pays a price for being too close to her own experiences, lacking the perspective and creative energy to transform the raw material into powerful fiction. This seems to be the problem in “My Suicides,” which simply recounts the cases of five people she knew who killed themselves, and in “Dogs Bark,” a grim chronicle of the writer’s 15-year-long battle with a neighbor who refused to make any effort to prevent her giant watchdogs from howling and barking their heads off at all hours of the day and night.

Gerber also ventures further afield, casting herself into the minds and hearts of characters very different from herself. “Honeymoon” takes us into the mind of a pretty blond 19-year-old department store clerk who marries a much older, thrice-divorced gambling man who takes her to Las Vegas on what proves to be a disillusioning honeymoon. Some stories are less convincing, and Gerber’s usual emotional honesty is oddly mixed with -- or, more accurately, swallowed up by -- a surprisingly timorous evasiveness in “Tell Me Your Secret.” The narrator, Franny, begins by telling us in intimate detail about a life-changing incident she experienced as a 1950s college coed, but her account breaks off before telling us what actually happened.

All, and more, is poignantly revealed in “Approval,” a brief but well-nigh perfect story full of surprises. Once again, we’re back with Will and Martha; this time, it’s Martha’s father who is the source of a tension less blatant than the one engendered by her in-laws, but not a whit less significant or real: the strain between the two men she loves, her father and her husband. In plain clear language incapable of disguise or pretension, Gerber discloses the source of the pain and, with a charity equal to her clarity, celebrates the satisfaction that comes with understanding.

Merle Rubin is a contributing writer for Book Review.