Sardonic musings in death’s shadow

If death is a part of life, as Gina Ochsner reminds us time and again in her wrenching second collection of stories, then what are the living supposed to do about it? She provides some unsettling solutions in “People I Wanted to Be.” Her characters tend to stick to two options -- staring down the abyss or flinching away from it like a boxer’s feint. Either way, there is no easy consolation, no neat and tidy tossing aside of the tragic or unfathomable. Her beaten down characters simply do what they can to keep moving forward, but tragedy haunts these stories like a determinedly present revenant.

Ochsner, an Oregon-based writer whose first collection, “The Necessary Grace to Fall,” won a clutch of awards, has a lean, poetic style whose fatalism brings to mind Flannery O’Connor’s. There’s also that unsettling twinge of O’Connor’s dark humor, the disarming beats that are funny-strange and disturbing. Levity, however parsimoniously it is doled out, is a kind of grace for Ochsner’s protagonists, who are dragging their pasts along with heavy hearts into uncertain fates. Death is never conveniently tamped down and tucked away; it’s always being exhumed.

In “Articles of Faith,” a Finnish woman who has had a trio of miscarriages experiences strange intimations of the three unborn children in the rustling of shrubs near her home, “passing themselves off, as they always did, as sudden shocks of chilly updrafts or, if it was daytime, as shafts of light, motes of dust, scraps of sky.” But this isn’t a fairy tale and the ghosts aren’t any consolation -- just wrathful taunts, reminders of the void in her life, the only things that could have salvaged her marriage.

The family in “How One Carries Another” is fractured by the relatively recent death of the mother as well as that of a son who had been killed in Vietnam. Still residing in the same house where the family was once whole, they are greeted by a fugitive artifacts -- audiotapes of wayward reminiscences from a man, perhaps the home’s previous owner, who appeared to have served in the Army during World War II.

The protagonist, the son who survives, thinks of the tapes as a primer on the self-actualized life: “I had wanted to travel, to be able to tell such stories, stories that might make other people think my life had been worth living.” Existence itself can be a death sentence for these characters; the unfulfilled life, it seems, isn’t worth living.

In the hands of a less skillful writer, some of these stories might come off as over-determined, their metaphors too ham-handed to blossom into anything other than clumsy allegories. But it is a testament to Ochsner’s empathy that she can make her most fanciful conceits work.

In “The Hurler,” a man fashions a catapult into which anything that catches his fancy -- dead animals, couches, tables -- is flung into an abandoned dump. Soon, his hobby becomes a neighborhood business, and locals start bringing him their hearts -- empty and broken: “Cracked and split at the chambers’ seams, these hearts still managed to continue beating. I couldn’t blame their former owners for jettisoning them. What good is a heart so wounded, rusted, stupid in its ways?”

But death can also be liberating. In “Halves of a Whole,” a woman is freed by the death of her twin sister. The crippling curse of the double -- the subjugation of individuality caused by biologically determined symbiosis -- has been cast aside, and brings an “obscene feeling of relief” that must be hidden, for “nowhere in all their grief literature were there any hints at the presence of such lightness and buoyancy.” These strange, poignant and deeply affecting stories creep up on you like nightmares that can’t be easily shaken off.

Marc Weingarten is the author of the forthcoming “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and the New Journalism Revolution.”