TOUCH WOOD

A slim but varied and accomplished third collection from a Pulitzer-nominee (The Kentucky Stories, 1983, not reviewed; Eelgrass, 1977, etc.).

Porter’s tales here are like modern art. As often as they demand meaning they question the relevance of it. And they are never about any one thing: a story that seems to be set in a French prison might suddenly become a lecture on the predictability of waves, or a couple’s encounter with a pseudo-pirate might lead into a discussion of 1950s crooners, or a story might be entirely and literally cerebral, as in “In the Mind.” The challenge is that there’s nothing simple: “A Man Wanted to Buy a Cat” is a weird, poetic episode about a man who covets his neighbor’s cat, but it’s really about rediscovering the pleasure of family; the fast-forward feel of Native American lives in “Naufrage and Diapason” simulates the choppy, disappearing wake of the ship of opportunity where we are told, “What is life after all but a piece of stretched meat? The story ratchets along regardless.” A lengthy and moving biography of a lighthouse operator on the Tunisian island of La Galite comes in “Scrupulous Amedee,” while the occasion of a hair-wrap in Key West (“Bone Key”) becomes an explanation of that odd town’s sensibility and a portrait of its underworld. “A Pear-Shaped Woman and a Fuddy-Duddy” begins a more self-aware movement in the stories, with characters attending a “character festival” in which they search for memorable characters in Mississippi only to reveal that they themselves are memorable. And the title piece, which closes the volume, is a series of random semi-stories injected with rhetoric on the effect of modern storytelling.

Smart, hard, and rewarding.