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I was amused at Barnes's cheek in using the same title as Frank Kermode's influential book on the theory of fiction, and even more amused when I saw a reference to it on the first page (“tick-tock”). Having just read Barnes's remarkable nonfiction book, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, a meditation on how to live with the idea that we will eventually die and disappear, I was also moved by the title and thought of Kermode's description of “our deep need for intelligible Ends.” Kermode goes on to say, “We project ourselves . . . past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle.”

I read this book twice, the first time for my book club. Tony Webster, retired, divorced, content with his unremarkable life, thinks back over his personal history, recounting episodes as he has always understood them. Then, the re-emergence of two friends from his past throws his understanding of those episodes into question.

I read quickly, page-turning indeed, to find a path out of my bafflement. Not that each scene wasn't precisely clear; it was. But I felt there was something more that I should understand, an underlying connection that was eluding me. We are set up from the beginning to expect more. “I remember” are the first words, and the first scene is from Tony's schooldays, in history class, where the new student, Adrian, makes a remark about the impossibility of ever knowing the truth about what happened. That sense of unease kept me reading until the end, although even then, as one of my book club friends said, we still don't know the truth; only what we are told by Tony.

History, time, memory: these are potent subjects, all the more so for me having just read Absalom, Absalom.

I actually enjoyed my second reading even more, going more slowly, seeing how each detail fit neatly into the whole. What a gem of a book! Tony has always felt in control of his life, but when he examines his memories, he finds instead that he has let things happen to him, settled for a peaceful life instead of the extravagant dreams of youth. What he believed were free choices were constrained by the forms imposed by his historical context (the times), and his understanding of them colored by his need for causality.

Kermode talks (with reference to Iris Murdoch and Ortega y Gasset) about the impossibility of a novel ever actually being true to life. A novel “imposes causality, development, character, a past which matters and a future within certain broad limits determined by the project of the author rather than that of the characters. They have their choices, but the novel has its end.” Thus, I was amused all over again by this meta-fiction, both the author and the narrator struggling to balance the messy facts of a life with the structure we require. The trick that Barnes pulls on the reader, well, me anyway, is to maintain all the uncertainty while creating a solid structure with every detail slotted into place.

Brilliant.

The author asked me to read and review this book, which he described as “a kind of Bildungsroman of my psychological life as a writer, psychotherapist, spiritual seeker, and teacher”. Intrigued, I agreed.

The book is a collection of short essays in three parts. The first and longest part is indeed about the life described above. The essays in the brief second part are mostly about films and actors, while those in the third part are mostly about members of his family. Contrary to my expectations, I found the latter two parts the most interesting. The often stilted prose of the first part smoothed out and became more natural. I also felt that the author was actually trying to convey something to me, to the reader.

This blog of mine grew out of the reading journal I kept where I noted what I as a writer learned from books that I read. What I learned from this book is how important it is to revise with the reader in mind. By that I don't mean write for the market—vampire books are selling well, so that's what I'll write—but take at least one editing pass through the book reading it as your reader will. Even better, have someone whose taste and honesty you trust read it. My writing group gave me invaluable assistance in this regard, telling me where I had not provided enough information or left the reader adrift after a flashback.

In the first essay in the book, Freese recounts how an early short story of his was published in The Best American Short Stories of 1975 under another author's name, an error he was unable to correct. From this experience he “learned a remarkable truth”: that he had worth as a writer and that he did not need “the fruit” of publication or public approval. In another essay he says, “Because I need to explain myself as I sojourn, I write not to entertain (shush!). I write not to sell, convince, or massage, much less condition. I write for the only audience that counts and that is me.”

He several times quotes Krishnamurti saying that every society is corrupt and refers to himself over and over as an outsider who has “de-conditioned” himself from the expectations of other people. That's fine, but at some point a writer must consider his reader, if he expects to have one. In his book On Writing Stephen King advises writers to close the door and write the first draft for themselves, but with the second draft, open the door and think of the reader.

In the essays in the first part, I found many opinions but little information to substantiate or give context to them. I also found almost no one besides the author. A few times he mentioned others—a student he felt sorry for; a wealthy mother and daughter at an auction; a blogger who wrote a savage review of his book, making him feel he “was being tortured by a Nazi”—but he says this student is just like the ones before and after him; the mother and daughter were as disgusting as all rich people with their conspicuous consumption during a recession; the blogger is just as vain, incompetent and ignorant as all bloggers. Perhaps this says more about my taste as a reader than about the book, but I was thrilled to get to the second part and read a whole essay about Buster Keaton. Then one about Peter Lorre! Or perhaps I just preferred reading what Freese admired about these artists rather than his contempt for our corrupt society and the Yahoos that populate it.

The best books, for me, are conversations. I was relieved to finish the first part where I felt someone was talking at me and move on to the second part where I felt someone was speaking with me. The third part, about Freese's family, moved me. I will long remember his Grandma Fanny, a free spirit, sometime seamstress, and surprising woman. Echoes of the young enchantress still hover around the elderly gypsy dragging her colorful hoardings from one garret to another. I love the vision of her tearing at a herring and gnawing on a piece of hard pumpernickel with her few remaining teeth. This lesson, too, I will take from the book: how effective sensory details can be in presenting a distinctive and astonishing life in just a few pages.

Otsuka's book gives us the lives of Japanese picture brides starting with their journey to the U.S. in the early 20th century. Contrary to the prosperous images promised them in letters, the men they married were mostly farmworkers, usually older and less attractive than the photographs the women had pored over before and during the journey. These women worked in the fields, as did the children they bore, and, later, as shop clerks and maids in the homes of the wealthy. We stay with them from the initial betrayal by their husbands through all the others that follow, the burden of poverty and discrimination, the small victories, up through the forced migration to the internment camps during World War II. It is a sad and moving story, filled with small details that drive home the realities they faced.

However, it was not quite as moving as I expected it to be. I felt distant from the women in the book, observing their pain but not feeling it. The reason, I believe, is that the book is written completely in the first person plural: we did this; one of us did that. While the details mount around the reader, there is no single person to follow or identify with, no central character, just the chorus. The details are all that one can ask for: specific, colorful, connected. The language is perfect, conveying their trials with dignity, without complaint. The thread of a common story emerges, but no individual faces. Perhaps if I were not already familiar with the story of these women and the suffering of hard-working Americans of Japanese descent in the internment camps, I would have been more shocked.

I loved and was fully invested in Joshua Ferris's remarkable Then We Came to the End, also written in first person plural. The difference is that, without losing his collective viewpoint, Ferris identified individuals I could care about, such as Lynn Mason, Joe Pope, and Tom Mota. Here, there is no one we stay with for more than a sentence. For example, this is how we learn about the children:

Some of them were stubborn and wilful and would not listen to a word we said. Others were more serene than the Buddha. He came into the world smiling. One loved her father more than anyone else. One hated bright colors. One would not go anywhere without his tin pail . . . They played by themselves all day long without making a sound while we worked nearby in the fields. They drew pictures in the dirt for hours. And whenever we tried to pick them up and carry them home they shook their heads and said, ‘I'm too heavy' or ‘Mama, rest.' They worried about us when we were tired. They worried about us when we were sad. They knew, without our telling them, when our knees were bothering us . . .

So, however beautifully written, I came away a little dissatisfied. I wanted individual faces to emerge from the crowd, so that I could give them the respect and attention due to each person. But that's my problem, not the book's. If I look at it as a prose poem, as some reviewers have suggested, then I have no complaint. I also see that I should look up her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, which follows a single family. For this new book, though, Otsuka has done an amazing amount of research and written an important and accomplished story. I hope many people read it and learn more about the details of these lives that threaten to disappear under the accumulation of history.

Atwood is best known for her novels such as Alias, Grace and The Handmaid's Tale, but it is her poetry that I have most valued. She writes in clear, compelling language, yet each poem contains a moment of surprise, of opening out into something beyond what I thought I understood. These revelatory connections and enlightenment—moments of being as Virginia Woolf called them, the leaping poetry Robert Bly described his book of that name—are what I look for in poetry. And what she refers to in “Poetry reading” in this volume, a description of a “well-known poet — ransacking his innards”. Understanding his compulsion, why he is not a bricklayer or dentist (“Hard-shelled. Impervious.”), detecting the craft behind the emotion, she is still surprised and struck.

Today poets are sometimes urged to make a single narrative of their poetry collection. Atwood has said that she writes individual poems, not volumes. She does not look ahead to how they might work together. I find the process of assembling a manuscript fascinating, entranced by how a poem changes when you set it next to another. Here, the book is divided into five sections. The first has to do with childhood and family; the second with the role of the poet, a theme she has come back to in several volumes. Writing in the turbulent second half of the 20th century, she has addressed political concerns while denying that the writer has a responsibility to society: “Books don't change the world.”

Yet she is still negotiating this relationship, and the poems of the third section address the wrongs of our society without the biting anger of True Stories but rather the insight of age. In “White Cotton T-Shirt” she remembers being a carefree teen-ager, saying “Ignorance makes all things clean. / Our knowledge weighs us down. We want it gone” yet goes on to write about Joan of Arc and war veterans who have kept “a hoard of buttons cut from corpses / as souvenirs”. Her writing has been called Northern Gothic and there are plenty of deliciously terrible images here. This is, after all, the woman who said that Grimm's Fairy Tales was the most influential book she ever read.

The fourth section seems almost a conversation with the preceding two sections. In poems such as “Enough of these discouragements, she defends the horrors she plumbs. “You wanted fire” she says. In “Another Visit to the Oracle” she says:

What would you prefer?

You'd like me to amuse you?

Do some jigs, or pranks? . . .

That's not what I do.

What I do: I see

in darkness. I see

darkness. I see you.

The last section reminds me that the poems in this 2007 book are those of a woman in her late 60s. Having addressed the horrors and dangers of our world, the loss of childhood and innocence, Atwood gives us the consolations of age, though slyly comparing them to the band on the Titanic in “Boat Song”. She talks of hearing “the man you love / talking to himself in the next room” and, listening, we are given the sense of what it means to share so long a life.

In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Atwood wrote: “Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.” This is what she has done for me, discovered my fears and secret joys and brought them out to the light.

It's not a promising premise for a book: one man's fear of death. Yet Barnes' wit and learning kept me turning pages, nodding and chuckling. The jibes are at himself; he admits to feeling competitive about the age he first woke to death-awareness (a moment Charles du Bos called le réveil mortel): thirteen or fourteen to his friend G.‘s ridiculously early age of four “(four! you bastard!)”. Throughout the book, Barnes contrasts his own approach as a novelist to questions about death and what comfort may be derived from various sources with those of his brother who is a philosopher. Their paths diverged at an early age, which Barnes attributes to his brother being bottle-fed, unlike himself. He goes on to turn this assumption, as with others in this fascinating book, on its head, pulling it apart to try to discover the truth of the matter.

Barnes also looks at how other novelists, philosophers, composers, and so on who are brooders about death make of these questions. He wonders if we would wish to be conscious during our dying, citing Roy Porter who did “‘Because, you know, you'd just be missing out on something otherwise.'” Jules Renard, whom Barnes calls “one of my dead, French, non-blood relatives”, famous for a novel set in his native village of Chitry, experienced three deaths in the space of twelve years: his father's suicide, his brother's sudden collapse while at work, and his mother's drowning in a well, which may have been an accident or another suicide. At his brother's gravesite, Renard notices a fat worm on the edge of the grave seeming to be celebrating. He says, “‘All I feel is a kind of anger at death and its imbecile tricks.'”

That worm returns near the end of the book as Barnes stands over the Renard family grave. This return to certain images and ideas helps to tie together what is essentially a long essay. Barnes hews closely to his main idea—how can we come to terms with our inevitable end?—but the little excursions are what make the book delightful. At one point, he visits the graves of other non-blood relatives. In a cemetery in Deauville, he uses his rental car keys to clear the lichen from the gravestone, but the spacing of the letters is a bit odd, so the name he actually reveals is FORD MAD OXFORD. His graveyard visits lead Barnes to meditate about some reader perhaps cleaning Barnes's own tombstone one day, and to examine what comfort may be drawn from the ongoing life of books, one's creations. Cold comfort, he concludes, citing once-famous authors who have fallen out of fashion and the likely demise of physical books in our online world. He deals similarly with other proposed panaceas: religion, release from pain, the need to make room for others, children and genetic immortality, the famous bird from medieval poetry that flies into a lighted hall and then out of it again.

Barnes is amusing on the subject of last words, admiringly citing an otherwise undistinguished teacher who had decided to say simply, “Damn!” However, he goes on to dash cold water on the most gloriously planned exit lines by describing the reality of the person's final hours. I recently said of a friend that he made a good death, meaning that on his last day he displayed a dignity and courage I'd not expected from him, or from anyone for that matter. In his shoes, or hospital gown rather, I'd have been curled up against the bed's bars howling.

Fear of death—my own death—has never absorbed much of my attention. I've certainly worried about running out of time to do the things I want to do. And feared the possibility of dementia. But a long time ago, before I was even out of my teens and long before starting to study Eastern religions, I made the decision to live every day and as a result don't feel that I've missed out on anything.

Even without sharing Barnes's preoccupation, though, I found the book fascinating enough to tear through it in just a few days. The primary ideas I will take away from this book are his final remarks on narrative and memory.

I'd heard good things about this series featuring Dr. Siri, the 74-year-old National Coroner of Laos. Set in the late 1970s, the story provides a portrait of life in the new People's Democratic Republic of Laos and its uneasy relationship with its neighbors' new regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. This historical and political background, though important, is sketched in briefly, a sentence here and there, barely discernible in the flow of the story in which Dr. Siri is called in on three related murders, young women who have been impaled by curiously sharpened épées.

Cotterill shows a Laos that seems less repressive than my preconceptions. Dr. Siri and his old friend, Civilai, carry on amusingly about the absurdities of the bureaucracy without fear of repercussions. They even feel safe enough to make fun of and try to undermine the applications for hero status which they have been invited to submit. Though the serious clerk does pull them up sharp with her own remarks, there are no threats or reprisals.

My favorite parts of the story are these conversations between the two friends, many at the cigarette and alcohol stand behind the market whose proprietor is called Two Thumbs because both of his thumbs are on one hand. When Civilai is asked to go on a diplomatic mission to Cambodia, supposedly just a public relations jaunt, he nominates his friend Siri as his companion. Siri agrees, remembering happy days in Phnom Penh with his first wife, Boua. He assumes his investigation will be wrapped up by then, even though Inspector Phosy seems set on the wrong suspect.

I found the investigation fascinating, with unexpected twists and turns complicated by the unfamiliar (to me) culture. I also liked that in the rush of the story, Cotterill found time for small descriptions that evoke the scenes and the way of life, such as the two-story spirit house constructed by Siri's wife Daeng. The upstairs is for the ancestors, protected with buddhas, incense, and wooden elephants, while the downstairs is for the phaphoom, spirits displaced from the land, their consumer longings appeased by doll furniture, toy tv and miniature Mercedes Benz. The rainy season has stayed beyond its limits, as though to make up for the previous year's drought, and as the story gathers speed we see rain finally begin to seep into a corner of the morgue where Siri's assistants, Nurse Dtui and Geung, construct a dam of sandbags. This corner eventually becomes a pond with a couple of water lilies.

Cotterill handles the mix of humor and gravity beautifully. Civilai, Phosy, Daeng, Dtui, Geung and other characters emerge as people interesting in themselves. Less successful to my mind were the interspersed scenes of a future or past situation involving Dr. Siri. Still, there was much to interest me, and I'll certainly look for more in the series.

In this astounding novel, we are given the story of Thomas Sutpen, a man who came out of the West Virginia mountains with nothing to his name, arriving in Yoknapatawpha County in 1833 to build a fortune and carve out a plantation, expecting to found a dynasty. We learn about him only indirectly, through the stories that are told to young Quentin Compson. About to leave for Harvard, Quentin endures the wisteria-scented heat of September listening to Miss Rosa Coldfield, whose sister married Sutpen and bore him two children, and his father, whose own father had been Sutpen's only friend. Once in the deadly cold of his Harvard dorm, Quentin and his roommate Shreve, a milk-fed Canadian encountering the twisted kudzu of the South for the first time, continue to try to wrestle the bits of story into a narrative that makes sense.

Each new fragment reveals and occludes the few bare facts, suggesting motives and rationales for everyone involved. New facts shift the pattern in a kaleidoscope whirl. Faulkner has said that no one character has the true story, but the reader can come to it. In last week's blog, I mentioned the impossibility of truly knowing someone's life. Here, where we do not hear from Sutpen himself, we find a mosaic assembled from what these others say about him which may turn out to be the most truthful way to get at the reality of another person and what is in his or her heart.

Faulkner describes language as “that meager and fragile thread . . . by which the little surface corners and edges of men's secret and solitary lives may be joined for an instant now and then before sinking back into the darkness where the spirit cried for the first time and was not heard and will cry for the last time and will not be heard then either.”

I believe this is true, that what binds us together is language and the stories that we tell.

It is almost impossible for me to read Faulkner with my writer's glasses on. This is my third time reading this particular novel, maybe my fourth. Each time (after the first) I thought Okay, now I'll really pay attention. And each time I've gotten swept up again in the dramatic flood of his language: a dizzying, poetic, mad rush of words. I binged on Faulkner as a teen, reading everything I could lay my hands on. I fell into his Yoknapatawpha County as into an alternate world and traced the lineages of the Compson, Sartoris and Snopes families through various novels and stories. I got drunk on his language, his sentences that went on and on yet made perfect sense and could not be any shorter.

Yet in an earlier reading, I managed to recognise that Sutpen is an avatar for the South, the old South of plantations and slavery that seceded from the U.S. and thus instigated the Civil War. Sutpen has that combination of hubris, courage, innocence, and greed; he believes that it is fine to use other people heartlessly in order to reach his own ends. And what trips him up is the fatal flaw that destroyed that South and continues to be the original sin that this country cannot get past.

And I'd marked what he said about women, as Rosa says: “I waited not for light but for that doom which we call female victory which is: endure and endure, without rhyme or reason or hope of reward—and then endure.”

In this reading I was taken with the structure of the book. Revelations are carefully meted out. The scene of Sutpen's son Henry in school with the dandy, Charles Bon, at the beginning is echoed by Quentin and Shreve at the end. Sutpen as a barefoot child is turned away from the front door of a mansion, setting in action his long quest, and then he himself turns a young man away—figuratively—by not acknowledging him as his son.

Or did he? I still don't know the truth of it. Yes, through all the bits and pieces I can see a narrative that makes sense, but I don't know that it is true. It is only what I'm told.

I've waited a couple of weeks to write about this book, but my thoughts still haven't settled. They are like the birds at the feeder, startling up at the slightest shadow into a flurry of wings. Ondaatje's books always give me plenty to think about, and this one is no exception.

The first part is about Anna and Claire, two teenaged sisters who live on a farm in Northern California with their father and a young man named Coop. The father had brought Coop from the neighboring farm to help with the work and learn to be a farmer after Coop's family was murdered. Older than the girls, Coop moves out to and restores the cabin that the girls' grandfather had built when he first came to stake his claim. The story moves between the three young people, circling around the incidents and stories that make up their past.

Details bring their lives into vivid focus: “Coop, who with his confidence would sweep a hay bale over his shoulder and walk to the barn lighting a cigarette with his free hand.” And “Sometimes Claire and I would come down the hill with the car lights turned off in complete blackness. Or we would climb from our bedroom window onto the skirt of the roof and lie flat on our backs on the large table-rock, still warm from the day, and talk and sing into the night. We counted out seconds between meteor showers slipping horizontal across the heavens.”

Later sections follow Anna, Claire and Coop as they move out into the world, scattered by an act of violence. Only Claire returns regularly from her job in San Francisco to visit her father and ride the high ridges of the farm. Coop has become a gambler, while Anna is in France, researching the life of a nearly-forgotten poet, Lucien Segura. She lives in his now-empty house and meets a young Romany named Rafael who once knew the author.

There are lovely structural parallels in the story. Rafael, Segura, and the three young people all are affected by fathers and stepfathers, their crafts and mistakes and disappearances. Segura's empty house echoes the grandfather's abandoned cabin and the deserted town of Allensworth in Southern California which Anna stops in during her flight from her father. The Central Plain of California, stark and barren, through which she travels was once a sea of flowers, like the depression in Segura's lawn that was once a pond. The story moves in and out of the past, setting up reflections and remnants.

Anna walks Segura's paths, swims in his stream, and sits at his blue table translating his work. She learns that she can hide in art, take refuge in the third person. I love the moment when she falls in love with the task, listening to Segura read some of his work on an old cylinder. “There was a sweet shadow and hesitance in Segura. it was like a ruined love, and it was familiar to me.” It reminded me of a recent conversation with my friend, Steve, when he told me of a casual comment that made him want to know more, and thus set him on his life's work. It also reminded me of a recent Writer's Almanac segment about Stephen Ambrose and how a professor's comment that a research paper “would add to the sum of the world's knowledge” changed his life.

What I find myself returning to again and again is Anna's quixotic effort to capture and preserve the past, Segura's past. A single life is short and buried in the flood of all the lives that come after and around it. You devote your life to accruing knowledge and experience. You expend considerable effort in shaping it into a coherent whole, and then you die and all of that is gone and no one really knows what it was like to be you. Marty introduced me to a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “People”, which has these lines: “To each his world is private . . . In any man who dies there dies with him / his first snow and kiss and fight / it goes with him . . Not people die but worlds die in them.”

The last part of the book gives us what Anna will never know: Segura's story. We find out why he left his family to come alone to the house where she sits, how Rafael met him, and why the blue table is important. Whole peoples have gone, whole towns deserted or drowned. We wonder about the Anasazi, the Mayans, the Minoans. We read about Colette or Wague and wonder What was it like to be you? The birds rise up again and then resettle in a different pattern.

I like reading books set in familiar places, but can also be entranced by those set in places where I'd like to go. Cara Black's mysteries featuring Aimee Leduc as a detective who mostly works computer security are set in Paris, a place that is high on my bucket list. Leduc is assisted by René Friant, only four feet tall, but dapper and wise.

On the very first page, as Leduc struggles to finish a system upgrade within the deadline, this story is launched by a phone call. A woman's voice begs her to go down to the courtyard, promising that it will only be for a few hours. When Leduc, armed with her Beretta carefully explores the courtyard, she finds a baby hidden behind the garbage containers. And we're off into a whirl of danger made even more frenetic by her attempts to care for the baby.

Black draws even the most minor of characters with a fine brush, such as the homeless man, Jules, with whom she takes refuge, or Jean Caplan who owns a dusty second-hand shop and tries to watch out for and feed Helene, an elderly woman whose life is packed into shopping bags. Black captures both the young and rebellious heir to a long-gone Polish monarchy and his uncle, an elderly Count hanging onto his memories, avoiding stereotypes and bring them both alive with small details and surprising inconsistencies.

Where Black really shines, or at least what delights me most are her descriptions of Paris, the back streets and hidden courtyards, the stones lining the Seine, the tunnels below. Leduc lives on the Ile Saint-Louis, a small island in the middle of the river, originally a “feudal island fortress”, now only eight blocks long and three blocks wide whose inhabitants refer to the rest of Paris as “the Continent”. Black shades the people and places with subtle references to the city's past. The faded aristocrats and the down-and-out both suffer the long reach of tragedy.

This is yet another excellent entry in the series: smart, fast-paced and full of heart. I highly recommend it.

I hadn't read anything of Styron's since Sophie's Choice but picked this up because I was spending a week in the Tidewater area of Virginia. The three stories making up the book are linked by having a common protagonist, Paul Whitehead. Set during the Depression and World War II, the stories present Paul's memories, based, as the Author's Note tells us, on Styron's own experiences. The tone of the stories avoids nostalgia and sentiment, giving us the boy's experiences unmediated by the experience of age.

The third story, which provides the name of the collection, is a masterpiece. On the morning in question, a brutally hot one, Paul is awakened at 1 a.m. by his mother's scream. In the last stages of cancer, her pain cannot be mitigated even by the morphine delivered by the night nurse. Forgotten, Paul lingers around the edges of the house where his mother is dying, overhearing his father's increasingly despairing conversations, taking comfort from the maid, Flo, who is legendary in the town for her crankiness, and examining his own memories of his parents arguing.

If I were teaching a class on the short story, I would have the students study this one carefully. It succeeds on all levels. The word choice reflects the vocabulary of a thirteen-year-old boy who likes to read, as we know from the books in his room. The things that he thinks about and notices—his guilt over drinking directly out of the water bottle in the refrigerator, the rankness of the chicken necks boys are using to catch crabs, his worry over what the changes in his body mean—are also typical and beautifully rendered in sentences that ache with clarity and emotion.

The organization of the story amazes me, the way answers are given and withheld, the echoes and repetitions, the gentle foreshadowing, the voices of the people in his world. Gruff Mr. Quigley docks Paul's pay for every soda and harangues Ralph, the store drudge, yet shows his compassionate side first to Ralph and later to Paul. Flo listens to radio preachers in the night and tries to comfort Paul with her faith, while later attempts by the Presbyterian minister and his wife to comfort Paul's father, a stalwart of the church, draw only a shocking contempt for a god who could allow such pain. The headlines of approaching war on the papers Paul delivers are echoed later as he trudges the street by the Flying Fortresses from the Army base down the road flying over him. And these signs of war are themselves premonitions of the death and grief to come.

The story takes on even more meaning when set against the other stories in the book. In the first story, “Love Day”, Paul is 20 and serving as a platoon leader in the Pacific. As he and his shipmates fret about when they will actually join the assault on Okinawa, Paul recalls an incident from childhood when their Oldsmobile broke down near a peanut field, and his father, although an engineer helping to build warships, is unable to fix it. Paul's remarks on a story in The Saturday Evening Post he's reading about a possible Japanese invasion earn him a tongue-lashing from his mother who loves the Japanese culture and upbraids him for reading trashy, scare-mongering stories. His father, who never raises his voice, a gentle poet somehow caught up in building war machines, snaps and tells her not to be such a fool, asking what she thinks he does all day, what she thinks the Flying Fortresses are that fly overhead every Sunday.

In the second story, “Shadrach”, Paul is ten and caught up with a family called the Dabneys, who have come down in the world, the father a bootlegger and the mother “a huge sweaty generous breadloaf of a woman”. An only child, he loves their “sheer teeming multitude” of seven children and loud eccentric life. One day, an ancient and emaciated black man turns up, Shadrach, who has walked from Alabama to die on Dabney land, 75 years after Mr. Dabney's great-grandfather sold him. Through dissolute generations since, the once-proud plantation has been reduced to a dilapidated box home made of concrete blocks.The struggling family nevertheless tries to honor the wishes of this all too human (and rank) reminder of their past.

The past and how it informs our present is one of the threads brought out by the proximity of these stories, as is the expectation of war, the small wars with those around us and the mechanized war of nations. But mostly the stories are about what it means to be a man, trying to protect your family and honor your legacy, taking refuge from emotion in gruffness and in words. This last reminds me of Ian McEwan's Solar which was also partially about hiding from emotion in words. McEwan's trademark of having some violent event intrude on normal life and set the story in motion seemed to me contrived after Styron's remarkable stories of the chaos that can upend our small and private lives.