One Way or Another: Stories

Although I prefer Peter Cameron's novels (Leap Year, The Weekend, Andorra, The City of Your Final Destination), he first made a name for himself in the mid-1980s with wistful short stories. Half the contents of this, his first book, were published in the _New Yorker_. Somewhat offbeat children and young adults of both sex experience the oddness of adults and the complicated relations among the adults they observe who are dying or have survived divorce, or are thinking about getting married. Not much happens and (as with many contemporary literary stories) the stories tend to stop rather than be wrapped up. Life and its uncertainties will go on for the somewhat perplexed, somewhat perplexing and never-fulfilled characters.Almost every story has an observation or dialogue that makes me laugh out loud. My favorites are two stories about young New Yorkers visiting relatives in Maine with a possible marriage partner ("Fast Forward" and "Nuptials and Heathens," the latter with the best absurd line in the book) and one about a young woman who has to pass calculus to begin Columbia MBA program in the fall ("Fear of Math"), though I was not sorry to have read any of the fourteen stories.