SUDDENLY LIGHT

The second book by Canadian author Dunic is a story collection centered on people who get tripped up while just trying to go about their lives.

Dunic’s characters are all different sorts, at all different stages of life, dealing with tragedies, indignities, and other wild cards that cause them to lose their footing. In “The Apartment,” the persistent seen-through-the-window nudity of a woman living in the apartment across the street alters the relationship of the narrator and his platonic male roommate. In “Bodies,” a boy becomes something of a celebrity at his school after he discovers a dead body in a neighborhood park. In “Divorce”—with its ending worthy of O. Henry, it’s one of the collection’s standouts—a cash-strapped young couple’s purchase of a small oil painting has unforeseen significance. Some recurring motifs bring an organic-seeming cohesion to the collection: Several key characters have been on the receiving end of violence. Others have been widowed. Several protagonists are children. Dunic’s people discover that they are at a loss to make human connections or otherwise find meaning; as the subject of one story thinks at one point, “Her predicament now was the life she had left.” A few of the stories don’t completely gel—they seem to end a page too early, or maybe a page too late—but all the pieces are beautifully etched thanks to Dunic’s flair for the power-packed chiseled sentence. As the widow from whose perspective the story “Youth” is told thinks about the teenagers she has taken to observing, “There was something pure about them, like elements…hot and bright or dark and cold, sparking off each other, reac­tive and explosive.”

These stories give literary realism a good name.