Poignant Prose

ARTS FAIR

BOOKS

Jane Smiley's formidable first collection

Jane Smiley's The Age of Grief (Knopf) resonates with the simple pathos of Chekhov. Her stories document transactions of the heart that leave both parties empty-handed. The landscape is midwestem, the people are vaguely sixties types approaching the far boundary of youth. In "Lily," a prizewinning poet wonders why her poetry elicits admiration but no dates. In "Long Distance," a young man learns from his girlfriend in Japan that her father is dying, and that she won't be visiting him after all. Minor disappointments, perhaps, but Smiley's austere prose imbues them with the weight of tragedy.

The title story, a novella that provoked much talk when it appeared in the inaugural number of Gordon Lish's Quarterly, is a small masterpiece about marriage, adultery, children— about the perils of domestic life. "Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me," muses the narrator, a dentist in the middle of the journey. "But when you are thirty-three, or thirtyfive, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from." No writer of the generation now in its thirties has written more movingly about what it feels like to become one's parents. The age of grief, it turns out, is now.

JAMES ATLAS