Living with Snakes

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Winner of this year's Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, this is a patchwork volume, some of its eleven pieces embarrassingly amateurish, others going bloodless under the burden of contrived or prefab themes, two touched by a life that lets them breathe. The most prevalent kind of story seems composed more to demonstrate its symbols than to reveal its people. In "The Inlet, " one wonders merely why a man stays married to his wife, so mean-spirited is she, as they boat on a lake, then into - and out off - a swampy inlet. Symbolism of a similar sort overwhelms psychological credibility in the title story, where a man rooms in a house with pseudo-hippie-incorrigibles who debase and demean him, while the one question - why doesn't he up and leave? - goes unanswered (and one of the awful flower children starves a nest of pet snakes upstairs). A man lusts excessively for a woman ballplayer ("The First Baseman") but can't act on his desire. (How come? Nobody's telling.) These stories, though, are less unsatisfying than "Trinity, " where the people (a divorced couple whose daughter has died) are so utterly lifeless that not even the author knows what to do with them but plod on (" 'The pursuit of form while denying the essence, ' he said"), perhaps yearning for (but missing) the bracing tonic of satire, or than "Billy Will's Song, " a thunderously cliched portrayal of a braggadocio workingman who lets the people on a bus think he's lost his arm in Vietnam rather than in a factory accident, until (poetic justice with the piety of the national anthem and the delicacy of a loaded cigar) the man in the seat behind him, wearing dark glasses, announces that he" 'just about lost my eyes in Vietnam, and I don't want to hear another word out of you.'" Editor of the literary magazine Ascent and author of five previous books, Curley does offer greater value in "Wild Geese" (a symbolic dream-narrative of imminent divorce and travel abroad) and in "Reflections in the Ice, " the book's best piece - a nostalgic story, in the warm, anecdotal tone of Sherwood Anderson, about Robert Martin, town drunk, fisherman, and fine teller of tall tales. But these aren't enough to even the keel and let this patched and laboring vessel find a fresh breeze. (Kirkus Reviews)