| AMONG THE MANY potent themes that weave in and out of the stories in "Sea Lovers" - the stark realities of the artist's path; the proximity of death to life; the complexities of the relationship between humans and animals - are a number of seemingly ordinary yet revelatory images. For Vaierie Martin's characters, something as simple as drinking a glass of water can yield a moment of reflection and clarity. In "Beethoven," a young woman in her painter boyfriend's stifling attic apartment downs her water while nakedly assessing their prospects, together and apart. In "The Change," it's a middle-aged man, also the partner of an artist, who's sleepless and thirsty in the middle of the night, contemplating his wife's unnerving transformation during menopause. The first story, like many in this collection, is set in New Orleans and its environs, where the inescapable heat encourages fevered anxieties and can melt reality into unfamiliar shapes. Martin (the author of over a dozen works of fiction, including the well-regarded historical novels "Mary Reilly" and "Property") has organized these 12 stories, most published in previous collections, into three sections. The first, "Among the Animals," consists of tales that set human and animal frailties and ferocities in counterpoint. Thus in the opener, "Spats," a distraught singer, abandoned by her husband, decides to take the only revenge legally permitted her - against the friendly but occasionally vicious dog he has left in her care. The ironically titled "The Consolation of Nature" is a vivid, nightmare-inducing account of one family's days-long battle against a rat trapped in their kitchen. (In an interview with the literary magazine Brick, Martin remarked that she wanted to call an early collection "Dead Animal Stories," but was dissuaded by her publisher.) The first section is followed by "Among the Artists" and then "Metamorphoses," a group of four tales featuring human-creature interactions that hover in a territory somewhere between the surreal and the gothic. In a short introduction, Martin explains her choice of these categories and traces the are she sees in her own career as she has moved, over the decades, from a spare severity to a fuller form. The later stories are graced with moments of dry humor. In "The Change," Evan, who loves his wife but is baffled by her new chill and distance, happens upon one of her menopause books: "A woman's book about women, he thought, about all the trials of their biology and psychology, the special wonderfulness of it all and the failure of men to comprehend any of it, though it was going on right under their noses." "The Change" is one of five long, searching stories about writers and artists, their passions and jealousies. In that same Brick interview, Martin referred to her lifelong "quest to de-romanticize the world in my fiction," and though the creators in these stories struggle - mostly with the issue of making enough money, but also with their professional status - she sees this not as ennobling but as an unadorned necessity. Philip, the 30-year-old artist in "Beethoven," lacking enough money to buy supplies, has taken to painting on the pages of wallpaper sample books. One such portrait - of the great composer - proves salable by his minor-league New Orleans gallery, whose owner has urged him to put identifiable landmarks in his work: "Tourists want stuff that says, 'This is New Orleans.'" When the girlfriend remarks that "Beethoven doesn't say, 'This is New Orleans,'" the gallery owner briskly explains that "Beethoven says Beethoven. Everyone knows him, everyone loves him," adding, "Bring me Einstein or Marilyn and I'll sell the pants off of 'em." Philip's girlfriend, who narrates the story from an unspecified later period, recalls her young idealistic self trying to convince him that painting a series of Beethovens could, in its own way, be meaningful. After all, didn't Monet paint many water lilies? Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again" is an implied reference in two of Martin's stories featuring writers, each canvasing the perils of homecoming - and of people recognizing themselves as characters in an author's work. "The Open Door" follows a poet as she attends a conference in Rome with her partner, tracing the ways their different responses to the city crystallize the painful differences between them. Isabel, a dancer, is eager to make a new home in Italy, while Edith, who has gotten into trouble with a too thinly disguised mocking of a colleague in her own verse ("Sullen Vixens" is the wonderful title of one of her collections), thinks she's unlikely ever to feel at home anywhere. "The Unfinished Novel," a near-novella-length story, is a dark and winding account of a New Orleans native's return from his placid existence in Vermont. Maxwell, now a successful novelist, is sucked into helping Rita. Blowzy, gone to seed, she in some ways represents the South about which Maxwell is so ambivalent: "Southerners, in my view, substituted stories for ideas." Rita is a liar and a manipulator, but she may have the greater literary talent - and his reaction to her unpublished manuscript reveals the difficulty in leaving one's past behind. Martin's prose is lucid, and she avoids stylistic pyrotechnics. Her primary aim is to allow her characters their contradictory feelings, giving them room to breathe. When she mentions Chekhov in her introduction, the reference is illuminating rather than presumptuous: We see her empathizing with modest souls who have great feelings, displaying a Chekhovian knack for the deflating, ordinary detail. In "The Freeze," a middle-aged woman recovering from a humiliating rejection by a younger man faces the unpleasant disposal of a dead cat in her yard, the animal having met an absurd, ignominious end that distracts her from her own embarrassment. In "His Blue Period," the story of a competitive friendship between two painters, Martin brilliantly notes the look of near pity on a wife's face as she gently points out her husband's long-hidden hypocrisy about a woman with whom he was once in love. Desire in Martin's stories is often unrequited, and sometimes doomed. A man looks at an ex for whom he still has feelings: "His dark eyes were fixed with a febrile intensity on Ingrid's back, bathing her with such a combination of sweetness, longing and terror that I thought she must feel it. Or hear it." In the stories in "Metamorphoses," a man might be ravaged by a mermaid or a woman might fall in love with a centaur; either way, the passionate encounter doesn't end well. Martin handles the surrealism in these tales with mixed success. The title story, first published 30 years ago, employs its metaphors about men and women with some clumsiness, and Martin doesn't always smoothly maneuver from naturalism to magic. Still, if magic is to take place anywhere, it should do so in New Orleans, and the city comes to life in Martin's hands. She gives us an exotic as well as historic Louisiana in the story about the centaur (which includes a great scene where the creature is moved to tears by a Donizetti opera), but she doesn't overlook the city's poverty, its shallow tourist attractions and, of course, its daunting climate. "The heat," the narrator of "Beethoven" confesses, "freighted with turpentine fumes, assaulted me, as fierce as a roomful of tigers." Martin's complex and wonderful stories, with their careful rendering and sober insights, offer their own kind of relief for the reader: This book is a long, cool drink of water. The heat encourages fevered anxieties and can melt reality into unfamiliar shapes. SYLVIA BROWNRIGG is the author of five novels. Her most recent book, a novel for children, "Kepler's Dream," was published under the name Juliet Bell. |
