LOST IN UTTAR PRADESH

A rich variety of settings, themes and characters distinguishes this collection from Connell (Deus Lo Volt!, 2000, etc.).

Several recurring characters function as authorial surrogates and analytical observers. Restless loner William Koerner, for example, appears as a former “john” who solicits conflicting stories about an unstable prostitute he cannot forget (“Hooker”); a dutiful nephew becomes inspired and baffled by his elderly uncle’s extravagant tales of foreign travels (“Nan Madol”); and an indignant liberal is appalled by his country’s political naiveté (“The Cuban Missile Crisis”). A reserved insurance executive known only as Muhlbach (also a prominent figure in Connell’s longer fiction) is the dysfunctional paterfamilias of an icy tragicomic family in “Arcturus,” which is inspired—as Connell’s “Preface” acknowledges—by Thomas Mann’s story “Disorder and Early Sorrow.” In “St. Augustine’s Pigeon,” the determined protagonist reinvents himself as a sexual being after his wife’s death had rendered him celibate for many years. The complacent suburbanite of Connell’s novel Mrs. Bridge is reborn, intriguingly, in the paired figures of a retired stockbroker (in “Proctor Bemis”), who laments his once-great country’s descent into mediocrity and dishonesty, and Bemis’s still resolutely conservative spouse (in “Mrs. Proctor Bemis”). Among other highlights: a ruthlessly concise allegorical narrative (the Hemingway-like morality tale “Lion”); a chilling image of peril at sea (“Yellow Raft”); and a viciously entertaining depiction of middle-class spiritual crisis (“Noah’s Ark”).

Connell combines the master fiction writer’s skills (brisk characterization, supple stylistic precision) with those of a compulsive traveler, ruminative antiquarian and borderline-eccentric obsessive.