Meanings of life

HERE’S a little advice: Don’t get too close to Joanna Scott’s characters. Don’t start empathizing with them or expect them to behave in certain ways. And whatever you do, don’t enter into relationships with them. It’s best to hunker down and watch the roller-coaster lives they lead scream out of control while you settle back and thank the good Lord, with dream-pinching fervor, that you don’t live their lives.

Take the father of the bride in Scott’s short story “Heaven and Hell.” He’s a lifelong ne’er-do-well accidentally locked in the bathroom of his hotel room and unable to make it to his daughter’s wedding, which is, by all accounts, the most beautiful ceremony of its kind ever performed -- complete with a deep, death- (or should we say, life-) defying kiss that lasts, some guests report, a full half-hour while the priest stands patiently by. Scott sums up his misbegotten life with a single image: “a sequence of contests with fate that he kept losing, but not without a struggle.”

“Heaven and Hell” opens “Everybody Loves Somebody,” Scott’s second collection of short fiction. (She’s published seven novels, as well.) The 10 stories here are nuanced gems of observation, glittering and diamond sharp. In “Stumble,” a woman named Ruth -- who “wasn’t exactly beautiful, nor was she ever deliberately coy” -- has many relationships with men, including her boss at Woolworth’s, because she believes that intimacy will allow her “to circumvent [their] evasions” and discover who they really are. “Worry” revolves around Mrs. Helen Weech Owen and her “contained life” -- a simple description that conveys a history of violence and bad decisions.

It’s not only women who populate these stories; Sir Maxwell Smedley-Bark, the 67-year-old protagonist of “Freeze-Out,” is “a man with a romantic disposition” who “keeps forgetting the meaning of love and feels it now as a confusing external pressure, a force that will flatten him at the moment when he allows himself to give up hope.” Forget describing what your characters look like. Scott evokes a life from the inside out.

Don’t even try to imagine how an author with such terrifying, penetrating intelligence might encapsulate your life in a sentence or, even more humiliating, in a phrase. It will only give you a headache. Most of us have the good sense to understand that we live one step away from utter failure. Scott knows exactly how a life might unravel to the point where a character does not recognize himself or herself. Ruth, for instance, has a reputation at school for being “easy.” She moves to the city but can’t help following the trail to abject humiliation -- aided, of course, by little pushes from her unsentimental creator -- as if she were playing a board game. In the collection’s longest piece, the novella-length “Or Else,” Nora, alone in Europe, her backpack stolen, takes money from the wallet of a man who helped her; just like that, she goes from good (if slightly damaged) girl to petty thief.

The line between vagrancy and citizenship is a particularly strong theme for fiction writers of certain periods. Those who live in times of intense, even inhuman moral standards (Victorian England, say, or the antebellum American South) are drawn, as if by gravitational forces, to this edge. The more ridiculous the fabric of a society, the more hypocritical its leaders and the greater its class divisions, the easier it is for a thinking person to fall. And once you do -- the well-planned life completely unraveling -- there’s no going back.

Many of the stories in this collection are set against a background reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow or even Charles Dickens: Big houses contrast sharply with New York tenements. Working girls, set newly adrift in a faltering economy, become fodder for sexual predators. Meanwhile, on the margins of these stories are ocean breezes that caress well-dressed shoulders, white linen on mahogany tables and Indian summer.

Scott completely fills her canvas. “[R]ippling unease” floats between characters. A click in a doorway tells a woman she “should have left destiny alone.” Tender gestures are as unforgettable as the squishy, mottled skin of a dead animal or the boy whose creepiness is useful because it teaches other children “to appreciate their nightmares, his example demonstrating the scope of human variation, preparing them for the unexpected.”

Unlike her equally astonishing novels, Scott’s short stories frequently explode. Here, she scrapes closer to the bone on the human carcass -- in her novels her beautiful descriptions of place and mood distract. It is rare that an author possesses the vision of both the predator and the prey -- a keen eye scans the landscape while the other tests the mettle of her enemies. Yet trapped in the topography of Scott’s stories, a reader might end up relying on these characters to teach him or her something about life.

And that would be a terrible mistake. *