Wonderful Tricks

Winner of the Mid-List First Series Award for Short Fiction. The loneliness and awkwardness of single parenting for the adolescent child and the parent figure prominently in Spatz's earnest, understated collection of stories. These stories concern love between father and son, mother and son, and between lovers and the characters confront a yearning for permanence and perfection in their relationships. They are searching for someone to hold on to, someone to come back for, someone to define for them the nature of love. These stories are geographically diverse, with settings spanning from New England, the Northeast, California, and the Midwest. Each of the stories have been previously published and include "Walking in My Sleep," "Lisa Picking Cockles," and "Plenty of Pools in Texas."

In the ten stories of this worthy short story collection, Spatz (No One but Us) explores the complicated, often bewildering emotions behind various forms of love: between fathers and sons, between spouses, between lovers. One beleaguered character rightly protests the facility of such categorizations: "I think it's amazing that we have words like that at all-'off and on,' 'married,' 'single,' whatever-like the things they refer to are even the least bit comprehensible." The tales, suffused with a gentle melancholy, are driven not by external events, which in most cases are insignificant, but by the characters' memories of loss and their futile search for unfettered affection. At his best, Spatz can subtly and economically depict the erosion or betrayal of love: in "Lisa Picking Cockles," a teenage son feeds private information about his famous artist father to a female reporter. In "Inversion," a woman lies awake with mysterious night sweats, realizing that she no longer wants to be with her husband. A woman asks her boyfriend to describe his final sexual encounter with each of his past lovers in "Anyone's Venus"; the boyfriend insists that last times always have a distinctly different feeling about them, even if you don't realize that it is the last time. Spatz does an admirable job of portraying his characters' inner lives in expressive but unadorned prose. Though the material isn't new, he avoids clich and offers some quietly moving, resonant images of emotional push and pull. Agent, Kyung Cho, Henry Dunow. (Sept. 15)
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This title won the First Series Award, which is given annually for an outstanding manuscript by a writer who has yet to publish a collection of short fiction. In 10 low-key stories, Spatz, author of the novel No One but Us (1995), writes about the emotional distance between fathers and sons and between lovers. Break-ups and desertion figure prominently as the people left behind reconfigure their relationships to accommodate the void. In "Lisa Picking Cockles," a son vies with his artist father for the attention of a young female interviewer, which somehow allows the teenager finally to understand all the reasons why his mother left his father; however, that hard-won insight in no way helps to clarify his own relationship with his dad. In "Anyone's Venus," a young man's remembrance of a summer spent with a former lover unexpectedly brings him to tears as he suddenly realizes that he will never again have what he had with that girl. Filled with unexpected insight, these stories will appeal to lovers of the form. Joanne Wilkinson
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