THE SURF GURU

Dorst's second book, following his debut novel Alive in Necropolis (2008), is a varied, inventive collection of stories.

The title tale, told in fragments, is equal parts rueful and playful, and features a surfing legend turned surfwear king who sits alone on his bluffside deck watching his customers (or, seen another way, his congregants) in the swells below—he's keeping an eye on his legacy, and maybe even rooting for it to unravel. A radically different story-in-snapshots, "Twelve Portraits of Dr. Gachet," follows Van Gogh's decline through the eyes of a personal physician who's part quack and part groupie. In "Vikings," two drifters on the lam stumble into a desert town where they find themselves out of money, out of time, out of patience...and in possession, suddenly and inexplicably, of a baby abandoned by a stranger. Rarely in debut story collections does a writer succeed in showing versatility and range without the book devolving into a miscellany, but Dorst expertly manages the feat. He attempts a Nabokovian trick of unreliable narration in "Splitters," a vengeful botanist's field guide to all the fellow botanists who screwed him over in life. In "Dinaburg's Cake," a baker grows dangerously obsessed with a lost wedding-cake commission, and meanwhile grapples with how to help her teen daughter, who's ripping out her own hair one strand at a time. Some stories—for instance, the magnificently odd meditation on war called "The Monkeys Howl, the Hagfish Feast" and the contemporary-campaign riff "The Candidate in Bloom"—offer a brand of magical realism. "Jumping Jacks," about a childhood accident involving fireworks, is a brief, lyrical, bittersweet reflection on the moment where a life went wrong (but oh man, was it beautiful). Still others ("Astronauts") have the humor, tragicomedy and slightly giddy downbeat feel of Denis Johnson's short fiction.

In this funny, poignant, risk-taking and mostly splendid collection, Dorst confirms the promise of his acclaimed first novel.