SMASH & GRAB

A distinguished Canadian writer offers 14 hallucinatory, offbeat stories about refugees and wanderers, exiles physical and/or psychological.

Jarman is one of those writers, like Padgett Powell or Joy Williams or Barry Hannah, whose style is the work’s substance, its DNA. His phrases (“We age into dinosaurs with embolisms,” say) burst with oddity and oomph. These often darkly funny stories are dispatches from people estranged and on edge. Built on voice and angle of vision, they sometimes have pretty slender narrative threads, and occasionally one will fail to launch. But the standouts, here in good supply, feel shockingly strange and moving and alive. “That Petrol Emotion” lets the reader eavesdrop on the monologue of an Irishwoman who’s hit a boy with her car and is furiously resisting public pleas to turn herself in; “Oh Well” is a shaggy, charmingly discursive tale in which a group of people blown in from elsewhere—the visiting narrator, his friend the emergency vet, a Frenchwoman and “Dada poet,” and a former military policeman—meet one night in a bar and form a witty, sometimes hostile community (à la Charles Portis); in “The Cutpurse of Venice,” a tourist is pursued by and then vengefully pursues a pickpocket, all the while meditating on the ways tourists like himself might also be opportunists looking to slip a hand in Italy’s pocket and take home a souvenir. Perhaps best of all is the dreamlike, sweet-tempered “The December Astronauts (or Moonbase Horse Code),” in which a heartsick former spaceman finds himself in reluctant exile on the moon, looking for new love amid the street crime and harsh light and forlornness and cruelty of this colony of misfits.

Not perfect, but excellent: quirky, stylish, daring.