F rom the wool scarf and tweed jacket he wears in the book jacket photo, to the trendy ambiguity of the title You Are Not A Stranger Here, Adam Haslett epitomizes the overeducated WASPy writerly type. You kind of want to punch the guy. But then his debut collection of short stories was both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award finalist, and hailed by nearly every major book critic in the country. He’s pretty much passed the hump of “flash-in-the-pan,” and entered the realm of “hard to discount.” And so I didn’t, and sure enough, it turns out the guy isn’t so punchable after all.
It’s hard to hate a guy who treats mental illness with as much sensitivity as Haslett does. The ailments afflicting his cast of loonies aren’t typical Rainman sensational bibble-babble, but are tinged with a heart-breaking self-awareness. In “War’s End” a clinically depressed teacher reflects on his relationship with his wife while on vacation with her in Britain. “Many times he’s wondered why… she still married him,” Haslett writes. “She was wrong to do it, he knows now, seeing her strained eyes and pursed lips, the way the old sympathy must fight against frustration.” His realization leads him away from his wife for the final time and down a very surprising path towards an old stranger and her fatally ill grandson.
“The Volunteer” follows the relationship between a high school boy and an elderly woman with some form of dementia, and the excellent opening story, “Notes to My Biographer,” depicts an old man with no idea the effects his obsessive compulsive disorder has on the people he loves.
Stylistically, Haslett has little new to offer. He writes with the simplistic sentence structure and calculated calm made all the rage by the likes of Carver, Hemingway, and even Chekhov. And yet his stories themselves are so quirky, the people in them so endearing, we really don’t care. After all, it’s not the packaging but what’s inside, and Haslett’s endless compassion and imagination cannot be constrained by the wrapping paper of literary cool, no matter how hard he tries. JUSTIN WESCOAT SANDERS III