HOW YOU LOSE

A powerful premise linking stories about a survivor on the one hand and the perpetrator of a violent crime on the other dwindles into halfhearted sketches of other only minimally related characters.

How You Lose opens with promise as Melody (Mel) returns to her father’s house, where he was killed by a teenaged intruder and she was shot and left for dead. In clean, simple, sensitive prose, Amberchele presents a woman seeking to exorcise the shock that left her numb more than terrified. The stories that follow, however, are less effective except for the stark, straightforward sections about Alex, the perpetrator—voiceless and damaged—in prison. Mel becomes a writer, develops psychic powers, and travels around taking notes while avoiding emotional engagement. Meanwhile, characters in the town of Crested Butte, Colorado, cope with relationships: Jarrold disappoints his father by fleeing from the corporate life in Philadelphia; his mother visits and is transformed; his father moves out after her death and is likewise transformed; Toni, the superwoman he marries, has a past with Dwight, the slovenly compulsive liar; Hank hitchhiked with Mel in Mexico and later draws her to Crested Butte. Some stories perhaps serve to raise questions about moral accountability among people in the mainstream and outside the prison walls: Jarrold, as a teenager, may have been responsible for the death of a girlfriend; a seemingly harmless loser turns out to be a gun-toting drug-dealer—but these are mostly uninvolving detours. By the time Melody visits Alex in prison and realizes he has nothing to give her to heal the ever-present wound she bears—and that she must do it herself—it’s hard to care.

Amberchele, now serving time in prison, won two first-prize PEN prison-writing awards. He demonstrates talent here, but too many of the very loosely linked sections that fill out the volume are unconvincing and meander away from the story’s heart.