A GATHERING OF BROKEN MIRRORS

This volume of short stories explores New York City’s immigrant communities.

“Survival comes in all shades, from all angles, all the time, and is worthy of reflection,” observes Shaw in the preface to his latest collection. Many of the 23 tales assembled here focus on the resilience of immigrants, particularly New Yorkers of Italian or African American descent. Each is tied to a particular location and time—for instance, the opening story is entitled “Sunday Gravy With Uncle Del (Todt Hill, Staten Island), September 12, 1982” and sumptuously describes the Neapolitan weekend ritual of families gathering to eat pasta before recounting Del’s mob-related yarns. Concentrating predominantly on 20th-century New York, the volume includes tales like “Out of the Sky,” which provides a ground-level account of the aftermath of a 1960 midair collision from the point of view of the Park Slope, Brooklyn, community where one of the planes crashed. “Miles Live!” captures the jazz musician Miles Davis appearing on The Dick Cavett Show in 1986. Shaw also turns his attention to personal struggles. “Last Dance” deals with a woman coming to terms with the death of her aging husband, and “It’s the End”examines an alcoholic writer, inhabiting a room in a flophouse, whose will to create is overtaken by his need to drink. Meanwhile, the author addresses contemporary unrest in “What Happened to the News?” which depicts the “Peoples’ Justice Collective” storming Grand Central Terminal.

This is an ambitious, varied collection with a number of standout stories. “The Shadow in the Valley: A Twisted Tale,” about a man who repeatedly encounters a female passenger on the subway who he suspects may be a spirit, makes for eerily compelling reading. When the man seeks the advice of a Jewish friend, confessing that he does not believe in ghosts, the retort is deliciously blunt: “You’re a Christian. You worship a spirit.” Shaw shows flashes of brilliance and is able to move readers. For instance, he elegantly captures the nuances of grief: “She had accepted that he was dying. She had reconciled her soul to what was coming, in the hope of a dignified departing that had been earned by them both.” But his narrative often deteriorates into mechanical reportage: “We were…looking out from the twenty-fifth floor after an entire morning of serial lovemaking….We returned to that bed and made more love.” The author’s use of dialogue is occasionally contrived and uncomfortably unrealistic: “Which do you want more, this meal or me? I have the key to a hotel room. Can you turn your hunger into food and be with me?” This meticulous volume is a courageous attempt to reflect the multifaceted nature of New York life, and the final offering, which portrays the empty metropolis as “drained of its blood,” is both timely and chilling. Yet Shaw’s execution is inconsistent, resulting in a disappointingly uneven collection. Avid lovers of New York will still enjoy this book, but others will struggle with its frequently flat narrative approach.

An intelligently conceived, sporadically luminous collection that sometimes misses the mark.