This Week's Reads

Charming but unreachable men, absent or might-as-well-be-absent fathers, and diseased mothers all recur throughout these stories, which are largely told from the point of view of children and childlike adults who feel isolated and powerless yet are tentatively pushing the grim limits of the society around them. A fired roadie lets the air out of everyone's tires in the club parking lot; a cop learns from his wife the illicit thrill of stealing; a Navajo girl pockets a ring at a trading post.

In one of my favorites, "Crazy Yellow," 8-year-old Peter ignores his hospitalized mother's instructions for contacting a baby-sitter and instead spends the night on his own. He then warily meets a vagrant a man with "no feeling in my extremities," he tells Peterwho's squatting in the vacant apartment downstairs. As Peter watches the man grill up a fish, Cummins beautifully, stirringly depicts the boy's fear and attraction, his awe at the dirty man's primal ease and self-reliance, his connection to a scary, succulent world of the senses, which the boy, living alone with his mother, is just beginning to explore.

A few of the pieces left me disappointed, like "Starburst," about the cop's klepto wife, which seems like low-grade Cheever, straining too hard to wring mystery from mundane material. (Then again, it appeared first in The New Yorker, so what do I know.) But the balance of these stories makes the exact opposite impressiondepicting, without irony or condescension, flawed small-timers and rural loners within whom Cummins finds a deep storehouse of flaws, longing, and complexity. MARK D. FEFER

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