ANTIOXIDANTS

Ten stories about men and women in crisis cover familiar ground with no particular flair.

The title story starts off with a heavy hand. On a beach getaway aimed at reconciliation, Paul’s wife, as he starts to reheat his coffee in the microwave, admonishes him: “If you drink it fresh, right after it’s brewed, you’ll get the benefit of its antioxidants. Reheat it, and you’re simply distilling the toxins.” “Just like our relationship,” Paul thinks to himself. The unlisted phone rings, and mysteriously Paul is talking with a terrified woman whose Santa Barbara–bound plane is plunging toward the ocean. By the end of the conversation with the doomed woman, Paul sees the world anew, recognizing how precious life is. But Liz doesn’t. Blake, a wannabe teacher turned editor with a half-finished novel in a drawer, hangs out at a sports bar and gets into trouble by losing bets with a Russian loan shark who demands (“Lesson Plan”) that Blake tutor his son for payment. Too late, he realizes how much he has lost. “All the Same” pits a pedantic professor against a Smith-educated hooker in an encounter her pimp calls “masturbation of the intellect” (the setting is tropical, and the professor “took in the weight of the full moon above, against an immense blanket of stars. Then the iridescent blue of the swimming pool distracted him . . . . ”). Cindy, in “Filagree,” celebrates the third month of living with Raymond by getting a rose tattooed on each breast. But Raymond’s attitude toward her and Mickey, the tattoo artist, leads to much bickering. Will she let Mickey finish the job, despite the pain? That’s all there is to this slight story, while “Matinee,” about a couple deciding to see a movie, is equally thin, and “Saving Grace,” a rambling therapy session as a country singer explores the last hours of his brother’s life, has less emotional strength than it should.

Tedious and trite debut. Nothing new here.