PIPERS AT THE GATES OF DAWN

Stegner (Fata Morgana, not reviewed, etc.) offers three linked novellas depicting life in the small, set-in-its-ways town of Harrow, Vermont.

The stories are connected not only by setting but also by the enigmatic figure of Sam Chase. In “The Hired Man,” the eponymous Chase appears mysteriously and offers his services to heavily burdened Ray Rinaldi, who takes him on at once. Though only 17, Ray runs the family dairy farm by default, since his feckless father is a fall-down drunk. Chase impresses his new boss—he’s a dab hand with anything mechanical, obeys orders with alacrity, and calls Ray “sir”—but Mama Rinaldi is harder to please. “Handy,” she acknowledges, “but he's got no feel for cows.” Thus alerted to a chink in Chase's armor, experienced readers will expect more dark news. In the triptych's title piece, they get it. Central here are the bright, attractive Hammonds, summer people, but long-term summer people, a condition that confers elite status. Overprivileged and underemployed, they have busied themselves hacking away at their marriage. Chase again makes himself handy, but this time perniciously—not to mention erotically (think Lady Chatterley's Lover). Now it's “Indian Summer,” and ailing but stoical Jack Sayers moves onstage. Sayers’s young nephew, Dartmouth student Kimball Dodge, is paying a visit, charged by his mother to check out Uncle Jack's physical condition. This takes a long time, since Jack has no fondness for the direct response, and once it’s finally established that he’s pretty sick he takes even longer explaining his refusal to do anything but suffer. It turns out that Chase, having wreaked his usual havoc, is at the heart of Jack's decision. Comeuppance, however, arrives at last.

Carefully, even gracefully written, but the Stegner’s people are either soapy or overfamiliar.