Different Visions

...In "Beulah Berlin, an A-Z," Boyd has created a particularly complex and formalistic structure...

...Life is just as cheap in the region's frenetic capital cities, flush with new money and delirious with new liberties...

...Alec would be richly dislikable were it not for his smart-ass wit and knack for cutting through pretension...

...It must be because I like the imposed shape: the rules, the order, the poetic matrix...

...When Ijoined the Peace Corps," he recently said in an interview, "I was looking for a way out of the very experientially sheltered Midwestern life I had enjoyed to that point...

...And Boyd's characters, or at least enough of them, do engage us...

...The author brings the same philosophy to these short stories, many of which seem fragmentary, beginnings without ends, ends without beginnings—tales simply petering out into a vague future, as is so often the case in real life...

...Another representative American is Donk, the hero of "Death Défier," who is a war photographer recording the mayhem of the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan...

...He stops washing...

...Things get weird...

...9" consists of random jottings in the narrator's journal...

...Notebook No...

...Boyd has written a purely supernatural tale, in the tradition of Poe...

...so far they have been to New Zealand and Jordan...

...Troubled by his personal failure, he returned five years later in an attempt to somehow make it up to the country he had abandoned...

...A break comes in Alec's self-indulgent routine when he befriends Ryan, a real sad sack—a Christian, no less—in the employ of an undercover missionary organization...

...the video device is only by-the-by...

...BISSELL, young as he is, up-to-the minute in subject matter and anointed with po-mo glamour by his connection with McSweeney's and his cover quote from Dave Eggers, is nevertheless a traditional writer, a master of the well-made slice-of-life...

...She blinks away the strands that catch in the barbed wire of her eyelashes...

...Thus the various segments of "Adult Video" appear under the headings «PLAY», «REWIND», «FAST FORWARD», «PAUSE», etc.—an apparent attempt to present the story in a filmic fashion...

...To quote Beulah, "Sestina, villanelle, sonnet...

...As for Christ, he "was something only an American would believe...

...His arms go around her and his palms rest on her lats...

...All this perfectly illustrates the essential difference between fiction and poetry...

...The standout in this collection, I think, is "A Haunting," not so much because it is the best story of the 14 but because it is the oddest...

...The Central Asians are mysterious to the American protagonists, simultaneously Asiatic and Russian, Islamic and (as a consequence of decades of Soviet rule) surprisingly secular...

...Finally there are the Sharks, "men and women whose in-country presence consisted solely of pocketing ducats...

...Along with the tourist-perfect, industry-friendly teardrop-and-puddle nations that had sprouted along Russia's western flank, ajigsaw of polysyllabic, hostilesounding nations had metastasized to the south...

...Tom Bissell's collection forms a coherent whole: the protagonists of his six stories are all observing, in their different ways and from their different points of view, the same world...

...The story, narrated by a performance artist, is divided into 26 discrete sections, each beginning with a consecutive letter of the alphabet...

...They think independence has made them a nation...

...We watch Jayne through Douglas' eyes, squatting at river's edge, "her thighs spreading like thick flanks of beef...

...We are not privy to Jayne's thoughts, but when she looks at him with her unblinking gaze we know that she is not impressed by what she sees...

...It's like hugging a wide-screen television...

...The 19-year-old son of two professional bodybuilders, he has been irreparably harmed by his parents' use of steroids during conception and pregnancy...

...Petersburg...

...Here a deeply confused American, a Christian missionary and practicing homosexual, is offered—practically sold—a teenaged Russian girl to marry and take back to America...

...One I especially like is Neil Tobin in "The Mind and Body Problem...

...The Americans are global arbiters, but they have lost their way: Unfamiliar with the wider world they are doing so much to change, they feel guilty about their privileges and supremely uncomfortable in their own skins...

...certainly it is the least concerned with contemporary notions about what fiction is and ought to be...

...As a Russian, she has no future in Uzbekistan, though her family has lived there for decades...

...But while this is a familiar and even hackneyed story, Bissell tells it with such grace, and makes it so concrete and contemporary, that we are easily drawn in...

...Most of them couldn't stray a block from embassy row without their cell phones, chauffeured cars, and International Herald Tribunes...

...She opens the door, turns and kisses him, full on the mouth...

...Its motivation is simple: every single scene is either sexy or violent...

...yet like everything Boyd produces, they are intelligent and controlled...

...it was ruled, as Boyd has said, by "chance, hazard, happenstance...

...My favorite poetic forms in order of preference...

...He loved Human Conflict not as an ideal but as a milieu, a state of mind one absorbed but was not absorbed by, the crucial difference between combatants and non...

...However, the thing is harder to manage than I had imagined...

...In these stories Boyd seeks to impose form not on the actual plots but on the manner of telling them...

...With surgical precision he divides the Americans in this capital into three groups...

...Ryan is so pathetic that Alec decides to give him a riotous night out, complete with drugs, alcohol and kinky sex, at a couple of the capital's mobster dives, the Hotel Ta-Ta and the Dutch Club...

...His debaucheries are carried out not in chic Manhattan, though, but in a surrealistic city with "weird, oppressive architecture," its inhabitants ruled by a "combo of Soviet paranoia and Muslim xenophobia...

...Bissell uses unforgettable little details to communicate the deterioration of Douglas and Jayne's once loving marriage...

...Donk dislikes what he thinks of as "emotional nudism": whether his obsession with death is love or hate is something he chooses not to consider...

...Now, in Afghanistan, he is faced with the task of keeping it at bay when a colleague develops a potent strain of malaria...

...Donk never saw that therapist, or any other, again...

...Alexander Rief, a high-end landscape designer, appears to be undergoing a midlife crisis...

...Petersburg (Pantheon, 212 pp., $20.00), a collection of stories by Tom Bissell...

...Interestingly, no matter how complex or structurally inventive Boyd gets in this volume, each story is only as memorable as the people in it...

...Douglas knows that he is "in possession of no special gift, no appreciable talent, a peasant in the New Economy's fiefdom, and that his parents, whose living disapproval had once made this condition acceptable, are dead...

...Soon his career is endangered, then his marriage...

...Bissell has succeeded in creating a character simultaneously despicable and sympathetic, and he has done it with the apparent ease of a far more experienced writer...

...Bissell had, indeed, made it up to Uzbekistan...

...The whole region is an ill-defined geographical entity...

...But in this case the evidence cannot be doubted...

...In any case Yves is delightful, and we follow his unremarkable routine with pleasure: his morning bath, his evening hot rum, his friendship with his cleaning lady, his writing routine...

...Douglas functions not only as a representative man, however, but as a representative American man, a member of the master race, and in this capacity his personal flaws become especially disturbing...

...I was not surprised to see that, although several of the stories in this collection were originally published in the New Yorker, this one was not among them...

...Does it not seem strange, I wonder rhetorically, that a man such as myself, who was born in the 19th century when Queen Victoria was on the throne, should, 75 years later, be exercising his imagination on such a project...

...For the last century, literary efforts, experimental or otherwise, have been concerned with human thoughts and motivations...

...In "Beulah Berlin," too, the innovative patterning is clever but extraneous to the reality of the story, which has everything to do with the rather irresistible character of Beulah as she sits smoking with her dying father and reading him poetry, visits the zoo to admire the peaceful rhinos, and discourses wittily on her career in conceptual art...

...His secret mission, to keep others from poisoning themselves with these substances, leads him to concoct and sell supposedly performanceenhancing potions that are actually harmless...

...Kazakhstan tests Douglas' manhood, and it will come as no surprise that he fails the test...

...A story less like New Yorker fiction could hardly be imagined...

...The collection's title story is equally successful...

...Visions Fugitives" intersperses script directions through an otherwise straightforward tale...

...The terrific irony of this is that I was scared, as they say, of my own shadow...

...the supernatural has been largely relegated to the no man's land of genre fiction...

...As one of Bissell's characters reflects, "The Soviet Union was no more...

...Their pose is awkward: She flattens her face on his chest, he rests his chin on the top of her head...

...He has abandoned us...

...hence his attraction to Human Conflict: "It was the one thing that survived every era, every philosophy, the one legacy each civilization surrendered to the next...

...We share Jayne and Viktor's contempt for Douglas, yet we share, too, their grudging pity and fellow-feeling: Which of us can deny our own pusillanimity and inadequacy...

...I had the idea in my bath one morning and I knew instantly I couldn't fail...

...The Americans in this collection of stories have all had their lives changed by their experiences in Central Asia, an ancient, violent and alien world...

...Ever since The Turn of the Screw, this sort of story has had a certain outcome: Alex would actually be having a breakdown, or it would appear that he mightbe having a breakdown...

...A new and very attractive contribution to this long cultural dialogue is God Lives in St...

...In "Expensive Trips Nowhere" (a story whose debt to Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" the author is quick to acknowledge) Bissell draws a marvelous picture of one of these bewildered souls...

...While formalistic rules so often enrich poetry, they seldom make a huge difference to fiction, for despite the efforts of so many writers, fiction remains stubbornly wed to character...

...God has deserted the Russians stranded in Central Asia—"God lives for Russians only in St...

...Now 30, Bissell was by his own admission the ultimate innocent American when he embarked for Uzbekistan in 1996...

...Trying to shave, Alex finds that his hand refuses to obey his brain and carves out a large, 19th-century mustache...

...Douglas is "a large, soft American oaf" in the eyes of his Kazakh wilderness guide, Viktor...

...What was wonderful about this book was the fact that try as he might, its hero, Logan Mountstuart, could never discern a coherent shape in his eventful life...

...First there are the Professional Expatriates at the embassy: "a lot of uptight stuffed shirts, stuffed blouses, stuffed heads...

...The despair of her mother has turned into ugly cynicism: "These filthy people think they can spit on Russians now, you know...

...And he knows, too, that he is a coward...

...William Boyd, more than 20 years Bissell's senior and himself a past master of the well-made tale, has filled his own new short story collection, Fascination (Knopf, 277 pp., $24.00), with more experimental forms...

...One day on a transatlantic flight, he is struck with a headache so severe it seems, in his words, to be "crawling around the interior of my skull, starting at the nape of the neck and then shifting around the right side of my head to lodge itself in the center of my forehead...

...Another lovely story is "The View from Yves Hill...

...Donk's way of handling death and his constant, generalized fear of it is to court it...

...It also leads to his beginning a romance with a young woman he tries to save from a self-destructive obsession with bodybuilding...

...Many other imaginative writers, among whom Ernest Hemingway is perhaps the most notable, have taken up the venerable idea...

...God does not live here...

...The Ambassador's Son" is narrated by Alec, a dissipated rich boy, son of an American ambassador to a Central Asian capital, a character straight out of Brett Easton Ellis...

...Then there are the Do-Gooders—Peace Corps folks, NGO employees et al.: "These people, God bless them, needed a serious f...ing clue...

...In The Loved One Evelyn Waugh satirized James' vision, but concurred with it...

...The movie scenario I'm writing is entitled Sex and Violence...

...Mark Twain mined it too, though in his work the innocence was frequently transmuted into a more attractive simplicity...

...Boyd's collection is more of a goulash: A bit of this, a bit of that, into a concoction so varied and spicy that the reader risks a slight case of indigestion...

...The story works when we believe in Edward and stops working when we don't...

...one has a hunch that the story might have originated as a study for Any Human Heart...

...Now they find themselves dwarfed on the steppes of Kazakhstan, "a sweep of land so huge and empty [Jayne] wonders if a place can be haunted by an absence of ghosts...

...They are animals, barbarians...

...Traveling through the starkest and most threatening landscape imaginable ("men, men, desert, men, men, men, guns, men, guns, guns, desert, guns, men"), he must defy death both for his friend's sake and his own...

...In spite of its facetious title, this book was not a self-conscious postmodern spoof but a fine travel chronicle and a heartfelt critique of the hubristic and shortsighted greed that led to the destruction of the Aral Sea, one of the world's largest inland bodies of water...

...Petersburg," comments the mother...

...For Donk, Human Suffering was curiously life-affirming, based as it was on avoiding death—indeed, on inflicting death pre-emptively on others...

...He lasted seven months and then, "suicidally miserable," fled for the security of home...

...the human motivations would trump the supernatural...

...Her ponytail comes apart, pungent oily hair falling into her down turned face...

...Even in her heels she's seven inches shorter than he is...

...Fascination lacks the artistic unity of Bissell's book, but it is a stimulating, enjoyable reminder of the many possibilities fiction can hold...

...The ensuing mayhem is comedy and tragedy together, with the result that Alec's seamlessly cynical worldview and his Olympian superiority to the troubles of the hoi polloi are shaken— though he will never admit this...

...We more or less ignore the segment headings of "Adult Video" and concentrate on the misadventures of Edward, its narrator, a confused intellectual trying to find his place in life and moving inexorably toward the wrong career and the wrong marriage...

...Duncan,' a therapist had once asked him, 'have you ever heard of the term chronic habitual suicide...

...His fine 2002 novel, Any Human Heart, told the story of one man's life as he progressed through the 20th century...

...The result was Chasing the Sea: Being a Narrative of a Journey Through Uzbekistan, Including Descriptions of Life Therein, Culminatingwith an Arrival at the Aral Sea, the World's Worst Man-made Ecological Catastrophe, in One Volume...

...Alex eventually decides that his body has been taken over by a ghost, and after some research he discovers whose it is...

...Boyd's tone on the subject of this strange little affair is exactly right, simultaneously poignant and disturbing: "Neil walks Doreen across the carpark of Body's East to her car...

...He develops an obsession with lowerclass women...

...Yves Ivan Hill, an elderly writer, is suspiciously reminiscent of Logan Mountstuart...

...He spends his parents' modest legacy on a yearly trip "nowhere" with his wife Jayne...

...Some of the tales work, some don't...

...He drinks too much...

...He continues the process with God Lives in St...