Tales of love and its hapless victims

THE male mind is exposed, for better and often worse, in “Don’t Make Me Stop Now” by Michael Parker. In this collection of stories, the author delves into the vicissitudes of love, with its humorous and heartbreaking consequences.

Parker’s characters struggle with alcohol, desire, obsession and loss -- but always they struggle. “What Happens Next,” moves back and forth in time as a Virginian named Charlie Yancey revisits his troubled teenage years and his fraught relationship with his father: “He needed his father to hug him or slap him, either one, anything but look beyond him.” Charlie uses the story of his grandmother’s death -- and his inadvertent culpability in it -- to gauge (in adulthood) his feelings for Teresa; if her reaction to his anecdote is sufficiently sympathetic and proves that she “delighted in abstractions or even drenching irony,” she might stand a chance at a relationship with him. But probably not.

Charlie admits that love “did not come easy to him -- he’d been with a couple dozen women since high school but none for longer than three years and some for as short as a couple months.” Detesting “the mawkish association of the heart with emotion,” he still hopes that Teresa will meet his many expectations and that their relationship might endure. He wants “the questions his story elicited in her to be searingly perceptive and gentle at once. He sort of needed her not to laugh, though ... he understood it was funny in a darkly gothic way.”

The hapless protagonist of “The Right to Remain” is similarly unlucky in love. Sanderson, unwilling to accept that his girlfriend has left him, burns down his house in an excruciatingly misguided effort to restore the relationship. Sitting in his car across the street from his ex-girlfriend’s house, he commiserates with his buddy Walter; both are “members of the same club -- broken, bitter-hearted ex-lovers refusing to move right along.”

The chain-smoking Sanderson mentally goes through a self-pitying litany of woes: He flunked out of college, got busted for drunk driving twice in five years and suffers from acid reflux. And when he’s with his family during the holidays, he has the “[s]tupid feeling ... like there’s something I’m supposed to say to claim my kinship to them or make them understand who it is I am, but I don’t know the right words and so they pretty much just ignore me. I open presents and eat turkey and get the hell out of there quick.”

The suffering of the protagonists blends together after awhile. The few stories that depart from this theme throw a bit of variety into the mix, but they are weaker. For example, “Hidden Meanings ... “ (the title is much longer) spoofs a stilted, chatty student essay, but it is merely tedious.

Parker, the author of “Hello Down There” and three other well-received novels as well as the story collection, “The Geographical Cure,” fares better when he sticks to men who dissect the messiness of heartbreak and love’s lessons learned. In “Couple Strike It Rich on Second Honeymoon,” Kevin ponders being reunited with Ann, as they give their relationship yet another try.

This time around, Kevin feels wiser going in, congratulating himself on “learning to love not who she was when he first met her but the woman she had become to him as he navigated all sorts of treacherous currents in his own psyche.” Real love, he believes, is “a frequent and vigilant gauging of your own reality, constant calibrations to include your lover in the world that would surely overwhelm you if you let it remain yours alone.”

Parker isn’t the most distinctive or flashy writer but the perceptiveness behind his writing makes his stories compelling. He plumbs the most pathetic, delusional, obsessive and humiliating depths of human behavior in matters of the heart. And he does so with obvious affection, creating empathetic characters who are all too familiar.

Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of six anthologies of poetry, including “Beat Poets” and “First Loves.”