Lives in Miniature

...In the end, he comes to terms with his family's history and his own troubles in an unexpected, and unexpectedly moving, way...

...In "Vigilance" Barnes has also produced an absolutely virtuosic meditation on the seismic shifts in marriage—or, rather, a marriage-like union...

...Perhaps significantly, the one that did not originally run there, "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden," is the least good of the group...

...He was a mere peasant...

...Koslowski's Odyssey from one dentist to another, from one unsuccessful treatment to another— bridges, implants, you name it—makes for grimly amusing reading: You cringe in pain, yet you know, as Koslowski knows, that dental pain is not real pain...

...Their relationship is not unusual: The wife is authoritative and controlling, the husband easygoing and ironic...

...How to find out, to penetrate the thick defensive layers behind which the couple hides the "reality" of their marriage...

...Schwartz' flair for ambiguity is on display in "By a Dimming Light" as well...

...he calls his mate "the higher authority" and gently defers to her judgment...

...It was all busyness on that empty street in its silence, all the store signs blazing away, the neon colors in the windows, the Laundromat, the check-cashing store, the onehour photo and passport, the newsdealer, the coffee shop, and the dry cleaner's, and the parking meters looking made of gold under the amber light of the street lamps...

...As one of his characters reflects, "that was that...

...Now, at only 58, he has taken on the subject of old age and imminent death in a series of exquisite short stories, The Lemon Table (Knopf, 240 pp., $22.95...

...Jim's fears, his neediness, his thwarted passion for his wife Betty (who has fallen under the sexual thrall of Walter John Harmon) have led him to accept her decision to join Harmon's community and, once there, to pile justification upon justification for staying even after the prophet runs off with the wayward Betty...

...But a glimpse at the jacket photo shows him to be reassuringly toned and buffed...

...That strange, that far away...

...After witnessing this predictable behavior for over 40 years, the narrator is suddenly confronted with the disturbing possibility that his mother's dominating tendencies have taken a serious, even dangerous turn...

...But people on the whole don't fart raucously in Mozart...

...The painful process that in the end makes renunciation a way of life is numbing...

...and "Walter John Harmon," the tale of a charismatic and corrupt religious leader as told by Jim, a member of his flock...

...he "knew the lure, the sickly fear and sickly envy of that priceless knowledge...

...On Fiction Lives in Miniature By Brooke Allen Despite the feints and stratagems of the Modern and Postmodern movements, the short story form perfected more than a century ago by Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov has not substantially changed...

...When you were a child, you thought you had friends, but in fact you only had allies—people on your side who would see you through until you were grown up...

...Barnes has done it so well that I worried, at first, about the state of his health: Had he aged prematurely, or did he suffer from some debilitating disease...

...The thought of their pain takes on the value of some esoteric secret...

...How lucky he was, they told him...

...Not that Jolene is passive or a "victim," but Doctorow does a superb job of making us understand the brutality of everyday existence for those without the protection of family or community...

...Ultimately, though, it is Susan—after having settled for so much less than his whole self, never making demands or asserting her personality—who comes to haunt him, along with the hopeless certainty that he has forever lost the opportunity of being with her, of fully knowing her...

...People who went to Peter's and heard Eddie the Dutch pianist play every night except Sunday...

...Like Shepard's plays, these stories evoke a dark side of the American experience and character that is frequently reflected in their landscapes...

...The early novels and stories of Julian Barnes gave the impression that he was just a bit precocious, too clever by half...

...Doctorow's Sweet Land Stories (Random, 147 pp., $22.95...

...Koslowski becomes so obsessed with his dental troubles that his work degenerates and his girlfriend—caught up in her human rights work with Bosnian rape victims, real sufferers— leaves him...

...Is this paranoia, or the truth...

...Baby Wilson already had a certain character that I found agreeable...

...We are invited at the outset to laugh and sympathize with the narrator, a 62-year-old music lover, as he gripes about noisy concertgoers: "As I say, it was a normal audience...

...As a youth, he is condescending when the barber chats boringly about his wife and children, and he gives it as his (secondhand) opinion that marriage is the sole adventure open to the cowardly...

...Doctorow's characters are formed by their native earth...

...Friend...

...To escape her dreadful foster family, pretty Jolene marries a sad, feeble boy...

...instead, he delves into what might be called the "American wasteland," territory memorably colonized a couple of decades ago by Sam Shepard...

...Schwartz, always behind the mask of Koslowski's persona, skillfully toys with our notions about how much of his pain is real and how much is displaced or "referred...

...In "The Fruit Cage," the narrator must cope with his parents, now 80ish...

...We all create images or perhaps caricatures for ourselves, and especially for oui" marriages...

...The daily tide—family, obligations, routine— carries us along so swiftly that we miss those rare open doors...

...Eric, a famous novelist who is going blind, is obliged to hire a graduate student to help him with his writing and correspondence...

...After a while Eric begins to think that Tad is changing words and phrases in his manuscript and inventing fan letters that will please him...

...But this pittance had been given him and he must embrace it...

...As a little boy, Gregory displaces his fear of getting a haircut with smug reflections on the ugly geezers in nearby chairs and on the probable pederastie tendencies of the barber...

...The tortured, ever mysterious subject of marriage is tackled, too, in Lynn Sharon Schwartz' new collection, Referred Pain (Counterpoint, 271 pp...

...the masters, from James Joyce to John Updike, have essentially adhered to the traditional structure...

...And here, from another story, is Beauregard, Texas, home to a sinister multinational corporation: "The Beauregard downtown looked as if it had succeeded in separating itself from the surrounding countryside: a core of glass-curtain office buildings, a couple of preserved old brick hotels with the state flag flying, chain department stores, and, dominating everything else, the skyscraping Utilicon building, a triangular tower faced in mirrors...

...A seasoned craftsman, Doctorow achieves the same success in portraying Lester, the narrator of "Baby Wilson...

...One night he cracks a tooth on an olive pit, and this sets offa two-year dental nightmare...

...One of Barnes' characters finds that in retirement, caring for her much-loved but now senile husband, their former life appears as quaint and irrelevant to her as the frolics of children...

...Many of Barnes' stories were first published in the New Yorker...

...Another good tale is "Sightings of Loretta," about a man's obsession with a childhood sweetheart...

...Why not...

...But his touchstone has always been the colorful Loretta, who has taken all the risks he has managed to avoid: "Her erratic appearances...

...Although Doctorow, now in his 70s, might well feel inclined to take on the topic of old age, he does not address it...

...The development, or degeneration, of a marriage over several decades is a rich and fraught subject...

...At least people don't fart in concerts...

...We are just horses in our stalls___The stalls are unnumbered, but even so we know our places...

...Occasionally, Schwartz plays around with the conventions of the short story genre, as in "The Word" and "Intrusions," where she weaves the experience and process of writing into the narrative...

...The opening story, "A Short History of Hairdressing," brings a man's life into focus by delving into his consciousness during three trips he makes to the barber: as a child, as a young man, and again in late middle age...

...almost too good to be true, in fact...

...A young man with a background of petty crime, Lester has his moral and emotional center challenged when his ditsy girlfriend kidnaps an infant from a neonatal ward...

...They gave meaning to everything else...

...It was the world going on as if people were the last thing it needed or wanted...

...Then you needed allies again, people to see you through until the end...

...In the collection's longest and probably most powerful tale, "Jolene: A Life," we are presented with roughly the first 30 years of a parentless girl who grows up without any guidance, in effect a piece of human flotsam...

...Louis family, a bom-again Christian who proves to be a wife-beater...

...Bennett, the protagonist, has led a safe life and married a safe woman, Susan...

...How lucky he was, until he hated the sound of the words that set him apart in his ignorance...

...People who stirred their coffee with vanilla pods...

...You get roughly the same amount of warning in my experience...

...Is she physically hurting her husband...

...As all three of these writers—the brilliant Barnes, in particular—demonstrate, the classic short story is still in its prime as a flexible and vigorous medium...

...His life, he admitted, had been one long cowardly adventure...

...As he has matured, though, his work has deepened, making him not only one of the wittiest and sharpest but one of the most truly interesting writers of his generation...

...Which is partly my point: If you can suppress at one end, why not at the other...

...His utterly persuasive depiction of the mental climate of old age— quite different from the crapulous malaise of middle age that he very effectively portrayed in fiction like the recent Love, etc.—is, indeed, an unusual achievement...

...And then...

...Well, yes, maybe a little...

...Eighty per cent on day release from the city's hospitals, with pulmonary wards and ear-nose-and-throat departments getting ticket priority...

...Also fine are "A House on the Plains," the story of a middle-aged woman (narrated by her son) who masterminds and commits a string of ruthless murders...

...Is Tad an opportunist, or just what he seems, an angel...

...He is, we learn, merely "one who stayed at home, went to work, and had his hair cut...

...Richard Koslowski, a musician and computer whiz in his early 30s, has heard all his life of his parents' sufferings during World War II: His father survived a German concentration camp, his mother nearly starved in the streets of Leningrad...

...In emotional limbo after his wife's death, Bennett nurtures his rare memories, his "sightings," of Loretta as he wonders whether he has wasted his life...

...Or more than a little...

...So I suppose a few vestiges of the thin crust of civilization which prevents our descent into utter barbarism are just about holding...

...But the most successful pieces in this collection are invariably traditional in form...

...This is a memorable and macabre story, reminiscent of the early Roald Dahl...

...Lester knows they will have to find a way to return the child in the end, but Karen's insane fantasy briefly triggers a whole new vision of what he might become: "Now I do admit that there came over me an idea I not only hadn't considered but that wouldn't have come even glancingly to my mind before this moment, which was to go with the flow—to take my girl's madness for my own, to embrace it as, before all this happened, I had customarily embraced her...

...Three new collections demonstrate its continued vitality...

...Then—in her case—they fell away, and there was being grown up, and Bill, and the children, and the children leaving, and Bill dying...

...Countless young and not-so-young Turks, of course, still try to stretch the limits of the genre—David Foster Wallace's just-published Oblivion is a case in point—but they seldom create really satisfactory work...

...Here, for instance, is a new bride who knows she has married a lout and a loser getting up in the middle of the night to look out of the window: "It was three in the morning by then, but all the streetlights were on and the traffic signals were going, though not a human being was in sight...

...Baby Wilson" is charming, the sunniest and gentlest piece in the collection...

...were like those rare moments of grace that descend out of the blue, on a crowded train, or on the beach, or when the mind wanders from a book—unsought, exhilarating, swiftly gone...

...a Vegas mobster...

...a sleazy tattoo parlor proprietor...

...Barnes' characters are, like all of us, self-deceivers who occasionally admit to disconcerting, even harrowing truths about themselves...

...The elderly Ivan Turgenev, who appears as a character in one of these stories, remarked that "After the age of 40 there is only one word to sum up the basis of life: Renunciation...

...Have you...

...Since everyone who goes to concerts, ballet or the theater has undoubtedly had such thoughts, we hardly notice when the narrator's irritation moves beyond mere pique to something nearly pathological...

...The strongest story in the collection is the title piece, "Referred Pain...

...It is an inspired device for juxtaposing the brute arrogance of youth with the pathetic reality of senescence...

...As the story progresses, we come to realize that the children are merely figments of the parents' imagination—part of an extraordinarily complex game played by husband and wife not only to fulfill their frustrated longing for progeny but, more obscurely, to negotiate power within the marriage and even to channel sexual tension...

...Like it had been back at the beginning...

...He understood nothing of suffering...

...Disturbed by the passage's implications for our own lives, we can't help applying the statement to ourselves...

...So were four of the five tales in E.L...

...Yes, she was a friend," Janice thinks...

...and the scion of a rich St...

...He captures the speed of the passing years and the evanescence of those never-to-berecovered turning points from which we so often embark upon the wrong path...

...Finally, back in the barber's chair after his own children are grown and gone, Gregory reflects sheepishly on just where all his arrogance and pretensions have led him...

...Their union ends in disaster, and we follow Jolene's progress from one unsatisfactory man to the next: her husband's virile, unscrupulous uncle...

...24.00...

...But in an obscure corner of the soul, you waited for them...

...Hostages to Fortune" introduces us to Nick and Julia Willard, an attractive middle-aged couple who often mention their grown children, Kevin and Joanne, to acquaintances and neighbors...

...There is no other life...

...People wearing clothes they thought fashionable but which now seem silly...

...I had this revelation of a new life for myself, a life I had never thought of aspiring to, where I would be someone's husband and someone else's father, dependable, holding down a full-time job, and building a place in the world for himself and his family...

...His parents, the women in Bosnia, the true sufferers all over the world, were the aristocrats of pain...

...There is Janice, for instance, an aging lady who has breakfast once a month with her friend Merrill, another widow...

...Book now for a better seat if you have a cough which comes in at more than 95 decibels...

...Over time these caricatures become practically indistinguishable from the real thing—if there is a "real thing" left beneath the mask...

...It is a heartbreaking rift with his partner, Andrew, that has set him on this bitter course and turned his love of music—like his love of Andrew—into a barren longing for the unattainable...

...And yet___Was it more that she was an ally...

...Is it true...

...Sex, nightclubs, travel, parties: "It seems like something other people did...

...A door opens, and then closes before you have time to walk through it...

...I've never heard anyone fart, anyway...

...The student in question, Tad, turns out to be better than Eric could have hoped...

...Molloy did not stop there but went on through the residential neighborhoods where imported trees shaded the lawns, until, after crossing the railroad tracks, he was bumping along on broken down roads past bodegas and Laundromats and packed-dirt playgrounds and cottages with chain-link fences bordering the yards...

...I expect they do...

...The panicky couple takes to the road...