THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

Family crisis and calamity rule the day in eight longish debut tales.

The worlds Stolar depicts are complete in their frankness and realism, but sometimes they feel put together like jigsaw puzzles, with familiar pieces stitched into unfamiliar patterns rather than uniquely painted or drawn. A sampling: in “Jack Landers is my Friend,” an ex-nerd mingles with his old high school crowd, now old enough to have “arrived at a point in our lives where infidelity, or at least the possibility of it, was an assumed feature of our social terrain.” But will this be the night when our narrator finally mingles with the girl he used to wonder about in school? A family saga emerges in “Home in New Hampshire” when a middle-aged woman’s below-the-waist paralysis creates predictable difficulty in a marriage (despite surgery that makes intercourse possible) and come to threaten the entire family. Another family theme appears in “Second Son” when an aging doctor’s responsibility to teach his second son how to drive becomes an opportunity for reflection on the progress of medicine and the old relationship with the first son. “Fundamentals” is a somewhat stilted basketball fable about competition reaching across generations to damage relationships. And in “Mourning,” a young man’s mother’s death by cancer while he is in college triggers a friendship with another young man (“Remember, this is the semester your mother died,” the friend says, helping the protagonist to cope and study. “We’re not shooting for A’s here”) that eventually becomes a sweetly mystical inauguration into adulthood and a study in healing and redemption. Stolar’s delivery is fresh in its simplicity but sometimes stale in its construction. The seams still show, and at moments sentiment comes to the fore where beauty is called for. But, with complicated plots, he shows a propensity for the longer form he’s almost certainly headed toward.

Stilted, but genuine.