The way things are

...Their absence, however, seems intended...

...So begins Richard Bausch's story "All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona," from his 1987 collection Spirits...

...In twentieth-century fiction, the kind of narrative design found in a Dickens novel-with plot twists, climaxes, recurrent themes-has been suspect...

...Consider a passage from "The Fireman's Wife": Martin and Teddy want to play Risk, though they're already arguing about the rules...

...And in The Last Good Time, widower Edward Cakes, "alone, because that was the way his life had gone," opens up his apartment to a pregnant woman half a century younger than he is...

...They suggest the ungraceful designs of human lives...

...When, for example, the middle-aged priest who is the main character in Bausch's first novel, Real Presence (1980), lets his mind turn to sin, he reflects on how boring it is: And one Saturday night, during a long, sleep-inducing stint in the confessional-how could anyone believe that sin was enticing, or that sins were interesting: it was all, always, so horribly the same, so mean, so colorless: it was the deepest boredom-he thought he recognized her voice...

...Bausch's constant, then, if not what he calls "the cramp of religion," is the cramp of ordinary American life...

...In Take Me Back, a teenage girl comes from New York to rural Virginia, startling a boy and his jaded stepfather with her vitality...

...Don DeLillo, for example, speaks of order and structure as "legitimate consolations" of fiction, which give us "the sense of balance that so often escapes us in ordinary experience...

...Each of them needs love...

...And when a widowed woman in "Ancient History" confesses to her son, "I don't know why, but I find it-well, reassuring, somehow, that we-we-leave such a gaping hole in everything everywhere we go," one feels that her tentative and enigmatic voice, like Bausch's, speaks truths that lurk in the hearts of the least of us...

...and a woman who lurks in the kitchen smoking cigarettes and brooding about her marriage while her husband and his shift mates play a drawn-out game of Risk ("The Fireman's Wife...

...While Point Royal, Virginia, for example, is presented in two novels and many stories, Bausch's depiction of it is a general one, without the loving specificity of William Kennedy's Albany or Andre Dubus's New England mill towns...

...With its unflinching portrayals of troubled characters, Richard Bausch's fiction achieves this suffering-with, a wisdom that enlightens without offering easy consolations...

...Just as he declines to make his characters unusually witty or charismatic, so he seems wary of streamlining their stories through the use of orderly or elegant narration...

...The novel's outcome hinges on a tabloid-style shooting, with Cole hating Field as much as he does Annie's new lover...

...Their brief, consummated romance is believable and not a bit tawdry-and full of the caring that is often absent from the more typical affairs Bausch depicts elsewhere...

...One person moves in on another, and they struggle to overcome their differences, eventually tolerating and even loving each other...

...What to call it...

...Instead, he tells stories of the kind longed for by the old man in Grace Paley's "A Conversation with My Father": "Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next...

...B ausch also stands apart from contemporary writers who have taken Catholicism as a subject or as a way of seeing...

...The real tie that binds in Bausch's work, though, is not a subject or a style, but a less tangible quality-a spirit, one might say, that fills his books, giving them wholeness, harmony, and radiance of a most elusive kind...

...Bausch's seeming indifference to structural harmony (in his novels, at least) has the effect of making the people he depicts more important than the way he depicts them...

...Made distant from their loved ones through death, divorce, or everyday estrangement, these people are nagged by their failures and regrets...

...I listened to her as much as I could...

...Wisely, Bausch doesn't dwell on the symbolic aspects of this dilemma, such a common one in fiction about the clergy...

...This compassion, she declared, "implies a recognition of sin...

...When, at nineteen, she marries Cole Gilbertson, a lazy and arrogant young Army veteran, Field, "acting out of love, and worry," sets about rectifying the situation...

...Perhaps-since it is in his more recent books that he shows his mastery of the short form-he is just getting better as he goes...

...If Flannery O'Connor strove to overcome the lack of a believing audience for her work by distorting Christian motifs until they shocked or provoked the reader, Bausch has evidently taken the opposite course, conforming his whole approach to a world of diminished expectations...

...And like the Dirty Realists, Bausch has an earnestness that cuts through his work's unaffecting surfaces...

...Reading Bausch, one goes to church infrequently, encounters virtually no Scripture or theology, and considers heaven and hell seldom-and then as a passing thought or a quaint but dogged notion...

...Spirits, called "a dazzling collection" by the late Walker Percy, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner fiction award, and the novel Mr...

...And Take Me Back (1981), though described by James Dickey as "seamless, perfectly wrought," seems to me all middle...

...What is the French game called...

...It was like everything I'd tried to teach her and everything we'd been to each other-it just all-it-none of it mattered...

...Yet Bausch stands apart from these writers...

...Returning home from a bitter meeting with his estranged wife, the narrator of "Police Dreams" (from Spirits) deliberately scares the sleeping babysitter...

...In Real Presence, the world-weary Father Sheppard is forced by his parishioners to house the luckless Bexleys: the public man of virtue is asked to put his money where his mouth is...

...But here, as elsewhere, Bausch resists the easy moral judgment...

...While his stories deal largely with separation, for example, his novels all depict tense and unlikely unions, in which the distance between people is briefly transcended...

...Such a view of sin is central to Bausch's fiction...

...The distance between people is Bausch's obsessive theme, and in four novels and two short-story collections, he has explored the nature of this distance and the unfortunate dramas that it creates...

...These, however, are consolations that Bausch has refused himself and his readers...

...Deeply felt, at once humorous and tragic, depicting the breakup of a loving family, the story can be seen as a. precis of its author's body of fiction...

...Walter is a Catholic-a lapsed one-and the father of five young children...

...In Real Presence, the closely drawn portrait of Father Sheppard is periodically interrupted by the thoughts of Elizabeth Bexley, whose displaced family has made itself welcome in his church's rectory...

...Field's Daughter can be read as a meditation on the plainness and vagueness of sin...

...Two have been selected for The Best American Short Stories 1990 by Richard Ford, the guest editor of this year's collection...

...its story seems never to rise or fall...

...On his own, haunted by memories of his father-an alcoholic and child abuser-he sees a psychologist, but "there is no use talking about childhood trauma and dreams: Walter is versed in the canon...

...And all of them reflect Bausch's affinity with writers such as Ford, Tobias Wolff, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Raymond Carver-a group whose hard-luck scenarios have earned them the nickname of "Dirty Realists," as well as critical praise and widespread public recognition...

...James, who at age eight announced his unbelief in God, "has since revised himself: he will grant the existence...

...Perhaps Bausch is simply a writer whose talents are better suited to short stories than to longer ones...

...matter...

...When young Mary Bellini in The Last Good Time argues that "the secret is not to care," one knows this to be untrue in the reading...

...He flattens out the distinctions between the unfailingly decent father and the drug-addled, ex-husband, believably showing the similarities between the two of them...

...When Walter is told, in "Flagstaff," that "life must be lived in the uncertainty of freedom of choice," the person doing the telling is not the priest, but the psychologist...

...All of these writers depict people who are unusually serious about their lives, and their use of fictional realism (a strategy considered outmoded not long ago) is meant to reflect a kind of moral realism that the authors and their characters share...

...He is glad to have her back, but his "soul turns on regret," and he spends nights "tightening the screws of [his] own pain...

...How did Martin pronounce it...

...Rarely does he avail himself of the modus operandi employed by most of the authors discussed in this series-that of using Christian rituals and symbolism as thematic conceits, to give shapeliness and intelligibility to the chaotic lives their fiction depicts...

...In the new book's "The Eyes of Love," a man is startled to find himself looking at his wife "as though he were a stranger, someone unable to imagine what anyone, another man, other men, could see in her to love...

...And this kid...

...Yet I wonder if there is in fact a design behind the awkward shapes of his novels-a guiding intention that, like so much in his work, is grounded in moral or religious convictions...

...There seems to be a real artistic asceticism at work here, with the author declining to stylize his characters' lives and thereby make them glamorous...

...as though he represented a species separate from her own," Bausch depicts Cole much the way he does Field: as frankly, sinfully human...

...Now, with his new collection, The Fireman's Wife and Other Stories, Bausch seems finally to be writing for a more general readership...

...These writers have often been compelled to justify their doing so...

...Walter's wife, Irene, is patient, practical, frugal: "she's had to be...

...And though it is not presented as such, Mr...

...trembling, shaking as if from a terrific chill, while the dark, the night, came...

...His settings are small towns of the kind that appear in so much contemporary fiction, but he has shorn them of the brand names and mundane details that such fiction has made its leitmotifs...

...What is the wrinkle...

...All of this ordinariness seems deliberate...

...His fiction is modest in form, lacking the confessional elegance of Ford's, the comic dexterity of Mason's, the idiomatic verve of Carver's...

...In The Last Good Time (1984), a touching depiction of a retired musician is set aside midway for the life story of the man's bedridden best friend...

...When Sheppard accepts the family into his rectory, he is not being Christlike, and he is not sidestepping hypocrisy...

...his hopes are for something else...

...In the title story, a writer goes on retreat to a country college, only Jo find "spirits" ruling his imaginative life: a serial killer on the news, John F. Kennedy, the former Kennedy aides whose love letters he reads while house-sitting in their apartment, and his wife, who has stayed behind in a distant university town...

...He is simply too dispirited to resist them...

...Until the novel's end the priest remains remorselessly selfish-so much so that his eventual change of heart is earned and convincing...

...He is also an alcoholic, and at this picnic he nips from a fifth of Jim Beam and presides over the family's discussion of the faith they have been raised in...

...As Thomas Cahill wrote of Spirits, "You feel...

...Many writers-and certainly the Dirty Realists-would offer such details as the very essence of their prose, to give it an urbane realness...

...And if Bausch's novels seem inharmonious in themselves, when considered in toto his work yields patterns and symmetries...

...How we choose to live is our own business," Annie has declared, but Field-and Bausch with him-is bent on suggesting the contrary: that our relationships and their histories grip us against our will, unfathomably and unshakably...

...O'Connor disparaged the word as one held dear by the reader who, "if he believes in grace at all, sees it as something which can be separated from nature and served to him raw as Instant Uplift...

...They seem the inevitable words, serviceable, but nothing more...

...Of his style, Thomas Cahill wrote in Commonweal [October 9, 1987], "It seems almost not to be there...

...As I read Bausch, I often long-in vain-for gratuitous style or wit...

...During a club discussion of single parenting, he confesses his sins: I've had trouble being patient sometimes, and sometimes I've probably been too patient...

...Spirits, while a collection of varied and independent stories, is also a thoroughgoing exploration of the nature of spirits...

...Cole has followed his wife and daughter back to Duluth, bringing an old girlfriend and a raging cocaine habit...

...The family goes home, where the drunken Walter chases the kids around the yard: and suddenly Irene tells Walter that she is leaving him...

...Bausch, though, has subdued the details through summary...

...Like the Dirty Realists, Bausch writes about characters in straitened circumstances: dead-end jobs and faltering marriages...

...In all of these stories, alcoholic spirits are a constant presence, ruining lives or easing the pain of them (told that whiskey kills brain cells, a character in "Wise Men at Their End" replies: "But we have millions of those...

...In the same way, his characters are frankly ordinary: smart but not learned, comic but not witty, reflective but rarely philosophical...

...Susan declares that she will be the church's first lady priest, then marry, after which she'll become pope...

...These are rendered in the whole range of short forms-letters, diaries, italicized monologues, third-person narration-and are often quite effective in themselves...

...William, having seen The Keys of the Kingdom, crosses himself and mutters, "Have mercy on us," sure that they are in a state of mortal sin...

...Since his wife's death, Field, a banker in Duluth, has raised Annie by himself...

...The title story is paired, to form a diptych, with one called "Consolation": as Milly Harmon deals with her husband's death and its consequences, we see a pattern of separation and contrived union that is familiar from Bausch's stories and novels...

...The new book, The Fireman's Wife, seems like a consolidation, in which Bausch ties together the strands of his subject and his style...

...I loathe him...

...Walter asks himself what they think "of the fact that he is, by every tenet of their religion, bound for hell...

...And so he finds himself in this church in Flagstaff, two years later, wondering if he should tell the priest "how he walked out to the very edge of the lawn and turned to look upon the lighted windows of the house, thinking of the people inside, whom he had named and loved and called sons, daughters, wife...

...Fair-minded as this strategy may be, it results in a frustrating looseness of structure...

...A Georgia native who teaches writing at George Mason University in Virginia, Bausch in the last decade has been a "writer's writer"-recognized in literary circles but unfamiliar to the public at large...

...The novel jumps around in place and time, presenting the perspectives of Field, Cole, Annie, her lover, and her daughter...

...As they disrupt his life, he doesn't think of them as a cross to bear, just as an annoyance...

...Like many a Bausch character, when Field finally acts he does so on impulse, having been "visited with the strange, elated conviction that no other outcome was possible...

...When we meet them, they are sinners in the mode of confession, but lacking the usual consolations-of church or community, of optimism or ironic detachment, of any practical miracle that will undo the done...

...His characters, ordinary middle-class and working-class Americans in many ways, live extraordinarily sad lives-lives sad in terms of twentieth-century standards of success, and sad in that they are shot through with the pain of separation...

...Call it care, concern, compassion-Bausch's novels and stories have it in abundance, and make it seem elemental and necessary...

...Though bleak, the lives Bausch depicts are rich with such understanding, for characters and readers alike...

...This design, paradoxically, has to do with a seeming absence of design...

...Many of the book's ten stories have appeared in large-circulation magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic...

...Novelist George has noted that Bausch's work is "firmly based upon assumptions of care, concern, compassion, and the rare and committed belief that the lives of his characters...

...Many modern writers have replaced this design with some exterior structural principle, such as myth, or some interior one, say, that of human consciousness...

...By writing books with rough edges, Bausch reminds us that these are only partial portraits, and implies that he makes no claim to understanding people in all their quirky complexity...

...And though two stories are disturbingly imitative ("Luck" of Raymond Carver, "Wedlock" of Tobias Wolff), the book as a whole shows that Bausch, a latecomer to literary celebrity, has been purveying dirty realism for a decade now...

...Just as his characters live in conventional frame houses and wear plain clothes, so their sins take unremarkable forms-bad habits, private grudges, unwise decisions, and the like...

...Stories in The Fireman's Wife, for example, depict newlyweds who spend their wedding night playing charades in a cheap motel room ("Wedlock...

...I never saw my father...

...As it depicts the strained relationship between a widowed father and his only daughter, the novel dramatizes the day-in, day-out strain of our having freedom of choice when so many of our choices later seem to have been wrong ones-when we don't know whether we have sinned or simply done the wrong thing for the right reasons...

...While he writes of Cole's girlfriend, "it had been one of her propensities to analyze him...

...Bausch's earlier novels, too, are ungainly and digressive...

...You come to feel that they exist outside the books themselves...

...I tried to be a friend to her, when that was called for, and a lot of the time, probably when it was not...

...Teddy says that a European version of the game contains a wrinkle that makes it more interesting, and Martin is arguing that the game itself was derived from some French game...

...Absent father, absent Father: you need not be a theologian or literary critic to see the analogy Bausch has developed here...

...She went on, however, to call attention to a better sense in which the word can be used: "the sense of being in travail with and for creation in its subjection to vanity...

...a young man of college age who paints houses with his alcoholic father ("Luck...

...Then the narrative moves ahead four years: Annie has left Cole and come, with her young daughter, to live with Field...

...And the spirit of an absent father looms over the book-from Walter's fear (in "Flagstaff') "that he will repeat, with his own children, the pattern of his father's brutality," to the dead man in "Contrition" of whom his son says: "I'm born Catholic and God is like a hurricane on the West Coast...

...Field's Daughter (1988) was warmly received by reviewers and other novelists...

...Two generous monologues, "Old West" and "Letter to the Lady of the House," reveal Bausch's ability to enter into the character of a very old man, which he demonstrated in The Last Good Time...

...The forced unions in Bausch's other novels, though not as dramatic, are no less challenging for the principals...

...I mean I tried to be a good father, and give her everything she needed to grow up and be whoever she wanted to be, and the result of all that was that she ran off with the first pretty-looking kid that came along...

...But Bausch's prose style varies little from one to the next, and so the different viewpoints blend together, unintentionally, rather than revealing by way of contrast...

...when we learn that Walter is a night clerk in a 7-Eleven, we feel pity for a father of five, not the delight of name recognition...

...This makes him laugh...

...When a man in "Wise Men at Their End" quotes Keats, it seems a quirk in his personality...

...He pursues the couple to Illinois, where he is struck by his now-pregnant daughter's descent into sordidness...

...Their only consolation is an understanding of the events that have enfolded them...

...this is a suffering-with, but one which blunts no edges and makes no excuses...

...Now, anyone who has fallen under the spell of Flannery O'Connor's essays will recoil at once from "compassion...

...To do this, he establishes a sort of fictional democracy in which no one character is allowed to fully claim the reader's attention or sympathy...

...that Bausch has imagined everything about these characters-the way they cried and held their bodies as infants, the way they hurt and admired themselves as adolescents, their secret yearnings, their middle-aged bowel movements, all their years and idiosyncracies, far beyond anything he sets on the page...

...when spoken, the names of the Lord are curses...

...As Annie is courted by and decides to marry a good man, twice her age, whom Field knows through the local widower's club, Field ponders his role in her life...

...There are no sermons here...