LAST YEAR’S JESUS

From a daughter of Motor City, ten debut stories that render with a light touch the gloomy lives of Polish Detroiters.

Things often go badly for the families here, but Slezak refuses to wallow in melancholia. In the title story, a plain-looking girl is shocked at the annual Passion parade when a gorgeous Hispanic man—who played Christ in the last year’s parade—keeps coming over to chat and put his arm around her. The flicker of desire that comes stabbing into Theresa’s life gets just as quickly shut away when the man’s attention is diverted by a model-type who stage-falls—so that he rushes to help her, forgetting all about Theresa. Slezak mixes any downbeat tone with a leavening humor. In the wonderful “Here in Car City,” another young woman, CeAnn, announces that “My family was not exactly thrilled when I bought an abandoned eight-unit . . . building in the middle of the city . . . and opened it as the Pensione Detroit . . . .” A waitress, CeAnn knows nothing about hotels but qualifies for a loan anyway since she’s opening in a ravaged part of town. It’s a while before she attracts any guests, and when they come, they’re all cash-paying alcoholics referred by Lodzia, a scam artist who sets up shop in the pensione and becomes friends with CeAnn. That this goony enterprise is headed for a precipice from the start doesn’t keep Slezak from giving CeAnn enough self-effacing good humor to keep the story from appearing at all condescending. Some tales are heavier, like “By Heart” (a teenaged boy goes to live with his distant father and legalistic stepmother after his mother dies) and the elegiac novella, “Head, Heart, Legs or Arms” (an 11-year-old girl comes of age during the Detroit riots). Throughout, Slezak has a deadeye and a humanizing take on her characters.

A winning, low-key volume true to its midwestern roots without being constricted by them.