THE LAST GOOD MAN

A gripping and remarkably fine first collection of 11 stories, mapping the changing moral byways of a dying New England mill-town and angling inside the lives of the town's often warring Irish, Italian, Wasp, and newer Puerto Rican inhabitants. In ``The First Snow,'' a contemporary 17-year-old son sticks by his father—a weak, overweight, Waspy Lawton Falls junior-high teacher who has just been arrested for homosexual conduct at a highway rest-stop—even though his mother and brother have fled in horror and he is repelled, too. In ``The Miracle,'' a devoted priest called Father D'Agostino, whose parish is the poorest in Lawton Falls in the 1960's, hesitantly asks a local gangster named Davio Giaccalone for help in saving the church from demolition; a fire is set elsewhere, the church is preserved, but a homeless man dies, and D'Agostino is undone by moral pain. In ``Violet'' and ``All Best Wishes,'' contemporary town yuppies face revealing romantic crises; and in ``The Greyhounds,'' two insouciant young computer programmers from out of town steal an aging Davio Giaccalone's beloved greyhound dog—a mistake, as it turns out, since Giaccalone is still dangerous. The violence turns explicit in the ``Brothers,'' about the gang rape of a Puerto Rican girl by three Irish and Italian garage mechanics in the 1970's. The girl, Maria Mendez, is seen again in ``The Birthday Cake,'' in which an old Italian woman refuses to give up the last cake in a neighborhood bakery for Maria's daughter's birthday party. Davio Giaccalone is definitively betrayed in the elegant, almost classic ``The Last Good Man'': while maneuvering to keep the town's last mill from being closed by the Japanese, he entrusts crucial information to a newspaper reporter who, however, has resolved to learn to look out for himself. There's more—all of it rich in detail and theme.