LAST CHANCES

A volume of short stories centers on themes of regret, loss, and redemption.

In this collection, Bartow presents 10 tales that turn on delicate moments of reconsideration and salvation. The first story, “The Last Chance Saloon,” sets out the general framework that most of the following tales will observe: battered souls seeking or unexpectedly finding new possibilities in life and love. In “Saloon,” 88-year-old widower and retired insurance salesman Sam Lundgren is installed in a “retirement village” by one of his two daughters. He’s crusty and abrupt, often declaring things to be “foolishness,” and he’s estranged from both children. But in his new setting, he meets a woman named Susan McCarthy and is surprised to begin feeling a deep attachment to her (“All the way home, seems like his arms are still holding the cloud of her blanket, his head is still full of that Susie scent, and his heart is still jumping from the jolt of her smile. Does this have anything to do with what people mean when they talk about being happy? Damn foolishness”). In “Getting It Right,” an executive vice president named Lacey Stewart meets an older man called John Forster who’s escaped from a nursing home and is looking for his long-lost wife, Helen. When Lacey returns him to his nursing home, she encounters his “fiercely cheerful” caretaker—and new opportunities in her bleak personal life. In the charming story “Amsterdam,” an international ad agency’s accounts manager, visiting the studio of a client, strikes up an unexpected friendship with a costume designer living in the same building.

Bartow crafts all of these tales in a uniform narrative voice and with a similar tempo. Her characters are refreshingly different from those found in a great deal of contemporary fiction: Not only do they tend to be older, but they’ve usually been scarred by life as well. They’ve either disappointed the people in their lives or been let down by them, and the central rhetorical gesture recurring throughout the collection is the refusal to see these failures as permanent limitations. The author’s players are well drawn; their dialogue is convincing; and in almost all cases, they unearth an element of hope. In “The Cave of the West Wind,” for instance, Emily is entranced by a Central Park art installation called The Gatesand is sure it will attract the attention of a writer named Jed, a man she hasn’t seen in over 30 years: “She is haunted by the certainty of him. For a time he gave her an Emily unimaginably more authentic than the imposter she had created to show the world because after all she had to be somebody.” Bartow’s knack for quick insights into her characters crops up in every story (“He is not accustomed to being dismissed, not by anyone and particularly not by her,” readers are told of one player. “When he stands stiff and arrogant like that she finds him less attractive, actually a little foolish”). The author’s characterizations are economical and precise, and although this can sometimes cause a flatness in her narration, the predominant effect is one of very effective empathy. These are believably flawed characters, which makes their promising discoveries all the more convincing.

An intriguing and often touching collection of tales about new beginnings.