Fables off Rescue

Anxious hearts and tough-skinned facades, in both clever urban millennials and "good country people," are rendered by Wirick with uncanny wisdom and perceptiveness, what the critic James Woods calls "Serious Noticing." A family on a cross-country trip takes in a Garden of Eden theme park-complete with serpent-and are stripped of their hayseed innocence; a woman loses her home and searches the Dark Web for remedies; a college man's flirtations reveal unwelcome surprises from his prey; college engineering students, skydiving, are mistakenly dropped over the night ocean; an artist's cleaning lady assembles tossed items into creations of her own.

Wirick's people are true to their dreams, guided by their hungers for art and love, and find in their searches adventures that are both earthly and supremely transcendent. These are a gritty testament to how we live now, battling against ennui and dead time, working inside the enormous fantasy systems of romance and the construction of personality. His pen burnishes the roughest of predicaments, and we see in them mirrors of ourselves, our Others, and the vectors of passion flowing between them. As always, the style is marvelous, "as close to song as prose can

become."