Phillip Sterling

Here's a rather joyless little collection of stories that I can't quite make up my mind about, except maybe for the "joyless" part. Because there's precious little humor here and no comic relief. Unrelieved sadness, uncertainty and misery just don't make for very pleasant reading. And on top of that, a few of the selections are not really stories at all, or barely so.

One piece in particular,"Within an Inch of the Burnished Knob," left me scratching my head, wondering, 'what the heck?' Because it really seems a kind of writing exercise - nine paragraphs, each beginning with the line, "Within an inch of the burnished knob, the hand hesitates." It could be intriguing, I suppose; poetically fanciful choices, like carefully fashioning a fort of fictional possibilities to go with that opening line, trying first this 'stone,' then that, searching for the best fit; for the line, the story that will most pefectly follow. Or at least that's my guess. I'm not sure I'm even close to getting it though. Maybe it's that "hesitates" that's key. Or then again, maybe I'm trying to make too much of it.

Interestingly enough, nearly half of the stories feature female protagonists, a hat trick not too many male writers can pull off. Larry McMurtry did it in a few of his early novels like MOVING ON and TERMS OF EDEARMENT. And now Phillip Sterling does a pretty passable job of it too, in short story form. A couple of these stories are even told in first-person - "What We Don't Know" features a disfigured woman working a night shift at a service station confronted with a mysterious weeping man in a truck. Does she try to offer comfort, or call the police? And what feelings or memories are evoked by her dilemma? A failed love affair, an abortion, a career derailed and a life gone wrong - a lot of stuff to compress into less than a dozen pages. But Sterling manages to make it all work quite credibly.

In "The Good Life," the narrator is Ginny, the wife of a cherry farmer with a bad heart who dreams of sailing the inland waterway one day - sadly, a dream deferred too long. This one works very well.

In my estimation, however, there are two near-gems here, and both are longer than the others. "The Last Swim of the Season" features a widowed writer who is a distant father and an occasional embarrassment to his adult daughter Karen, the protagonist, who avoids commitment and has a string of failed relationships. The characters are intriguing and quite real, yet I found the ending a bit too abrupt and frustrating. Was it a dream or not?

But the centerpiece of the collection is the longest story, "An Account in Her Name." Once more the protagonist is a woman, come back to the northern Michigan village of Beaulah and the shore of Crystal Lake where several of her formative years were spent. The details of the tourist-filled town in summer are clear and distinctive. And the story of an American dream gone sour, a family that breaks and scatters, and a beloved sister who simply vanishes one day are nearly enough to break your heart. This story alone is almost worth the price of admission, and could have all by itself earned Sterling entry into the prestigious Made In Michigan Writers Series, of which this collection, IN WHICH BRIEF STORIES ARE TOLD, is the newest member.

I wanted to love this book, but I only liked parts of it. And it's hard to really love a book that has so little happiness in it. That "joyless" thing I mentioned earlier. But maybe that's only me. Try it. Maybe you'll like it.… (meer)