STEALING THE FIRE

In her debut collection, Ciabattari is a master of transformation as she gives these stories of loss, woe, crisis, and collapse the salutary and sometimes bracing pleasures of plain good fiction.

The title story in some ways is the best, certainly the most literary, and readers might wish it to have been last instead of first. A troubled young woman’s divorced father, a writer, dies at 47 of degenerative heart disease, but not before handing on to his daughter the desire to write—and an understanding, in the blood, of the enormity of the calling and the terrible difficulty of it (“Write what cannot be said,” he tells her). Symbols often fall into place with a proper lightness, as in “Totem,” when Indian monuments in the Pacific Northwest provide solace for a woman who’s recently suffered a miscarriage. “A Pilgrimage” rings less true: a widow travels to a warring El Salvador on an errand of mercy and witnesses violent death, but the character remains under-realized for the reader to join in the story’s feeling. The enormity of a missed life, however, is more easily felt in “The Almost-Perfect Man,” when an academic realizes that the life she should have had will never be hers. In the lesser “Once in a Blue Moon,” a woman thinks back wistfully on the missions and music of the ’60s, and in “Gridlock,” the marriage of two actors suffers lean times until an adjustment is made. More powerful and emotionally full are “Payback Time” (a young man in Silicon Valley has the bottom fall out of his world), “Memorial Day” (a woman’s grown son has behavioral problems that bring cataclysm and tragedy), and the Salinger-echoing study, “Wintering at Montauk,” about a 30-year-old who’s been a failure at everything he’s tried and now, alone in his parents’ beach house for the winter, watches himself fall apart.

Tales of difficulty and trial, written with heart and offering moments of recognition throughout.