WHAT SHE LEFT ME

A debut collection, mostly set in the Midwest, that won the Bread Loaf Writers” Conference’s 1998 Bakeless Literary Publication Prize for Fiction. Doenges’s characters seem nondescript at first meeting; actually, though, they—re nearly all misfits in some secret or obvious way. Sandra, in the title story, is a good example. Having nursed her alcoholic mother through the final stages of the cancer that eventually killed her, she’s unprepared to face life on her own and mopes about the house sorting through the useless paraphernalia her mother left behind. “MIB” is a sad woman’s recollection of her difficult childhood, in the course of which her only escape from her drunken mother’s miseries was in the company of a neighborhood boy who, like herself, grew up to become a homosexual; years later he’s an AIDS activist and brings her into the movement. Crime figures prominently in Doenges’s imagination: the teenagers of “Crooks” are garden-variety juvenile delinquents who steal and sleep around, while the pregnant woman of “Solved,” arrested by bounty hunters for a bad debt—to her bail bondsman—goes into labor while in custody. The unhappy husband of “Occidental” goes to a local bar to tie one on after his wife throws him out, but his unhappiness has deeper roots: he’s a Vietnam vet still haunted by the war. The best piece here is the novella,—God of Gods,” about a closeted gay butcher’s reaction to the race riots and political turmoil of Chicago in the early 1970s. Vivid yet understated, it captures the fear of a society in the thrall of violent and sudden change. A good beginning that needs to be pushed further: Doenges works her subjects well but not hard enough to earn for them the weight that they could have.