WHILE IT LASTS

This collection of 17 stories covers life across contemporary America and historic Europe, with an eye toward has-beens and yet-to-be’s.

Mark Rothko, who “has yet to pick up a brush or touch paint to canvas,” weeps after he catches a similarly young Clark Gable seducing their acting teacher in Portland, Oregon. A lightly fictionalized Arnold Schoenberg begins to compose the music that will make him famous, while his wife carries out an affair with a younger painter. Meanwhile, the 19th-century English boxer Daniel Mendoza and a lightly fictionalized version of “American primitive” guitar player John Fahey seek a past-their-prime payday. All of these events are true, more or less, but in imagining obscure incidents from the lives of well-known, largely Jewish people, Nadelson doesn’t add to our understanding of these figures. Rather, the stories hope to borrow their subjects' gravity without offering much in return. Stronger are Nadelson’s more contemporary stories, largely set in Portland or northern New Jersey. In one of the best, “Loyalists,” a teenager obsessed with British culture (his love for Quadrophenia has led him backward into King George III apologetics) causes some property damage with the help of a Revolutionary War–era bayonet. In another, a college dropout earns some extra income digitally editing soft-core pornography and receives a lesson in desire. Throughout, Nadelson’s prose teeters between simplicity and cliché. Two separate middle-aged men are both described using the phrase “balding and paunchy,” one example of Nadelson’s habit of telling-not-showing via bromides. The prose has a flattening effect: Readers won’t struggle with these stories, but a lack of depth means they also won’t be engaged by the strongest of them.

A workmanlike volume that congregates interesting characters and then doesn’t do much with them.