Evanier, in these 14 stories involving a writer named Bruce Orav, moves through jigsawed, painful levels of mistake, embarrassment, and failure: they horrify one minute and astonish the next; they seem truly unbearable yet also, at the same time, exaltedly poetic. Bruce, self-admittedly, is "crumbling," getting hardly anywhere with his writing and his life—a decline seen mostly through his closest, most difficult relationships. There are brief glimpses of his mother, whom he has chosen to avoid for 20 years, ever since she divorced his insurance-salesman father. There's a more intensive view of this divorced father--with his Cadillac, his bland bachelor diet of roast chicken and yogurt, his single-scenes experiences in the Catskills, his weekly cafeteria lunches with Bruce: "You're a man, Bruce...

you're thirty-three years old. You've made me so proud of you. If you would only ease up on the pepper and salt, I'd be the happiest man in the world." (Also, the father's murderous put-downs of Bruce's career: "I thought there was a chance you'd have a best-seller sometime. That's dead, huh?") There are unnerving close-ups of Bruce's wife Susan and her teenaged son Danny (toward whom Bruce is often cruel, unhelpful, loving but graceless); of various psychiatrists, including a black radical quack who can only suggest that Bruce join a dating club; of an old Jewish lady whom Bruce and Susan voluntarily visit once a week--a victim but also a victimizer, given to encouraging wild emotional scenes with her black home-attendants. And most chilling, unforgettably touching, is Bruce's recording of the social arrangements of work: in the near-classic title story, already familiar from anthologies, the office of a minor Jewish philanthropic organization--staffed by has-beens, failures, and the lost—is spectacularly rendered by Evanier in fidelity to non sequitur and eccentricity. The central office figure is Luther: he's middle-aged, divorced, ill-tempered ("Abe Stern, a staff member, comes over to us and expresses shock at Stephen's illness. After he leaves Luther comments, ‘He's shocked? What do I care if he's shocked? These immature fifty-year olds looking for self congratulations!'"); he's a walking id who "spends the evening watching TV, ‘talking back to the box' when he gets angry at what he is watching. His daughters do not call him. He says about children, ’My experience has always been that kids are cannibals and killers.' When a child comes into the office, Stephen's face brightens and he goes over to it. Luther calls out sarcastically across the office, 'Pet her, Stephen. Go ahead and pet the little killer.'" Yet Luther is only the finest and most indelible of the many Evanier unsavories here (Bruce included), walking a wire between our disgust but also our love; in his chipped, dialogue-dependent stories (which, like pain, stop rather than end), Evanier advances an ambivalent humanness that goes further than smooth tales of "nice people." And though the result is a discomforting, even occasionally loathsome book, it has the brutal and appalling comedy of uncompromising truth: a powerful compendium of honest psychology and grotesque human beauty.