Very Much Like Desire

An excellent collection. Lefer lays her settings in a wide variety of locales: Turkey, Manhattan, North Dakota, and various unidentified places in "The Heartland." Her characters are frequently perplexed. Eileen, in "Yasmin" cannot find the political refugee she is assigned to help. Midge, in "Voluntaries," had a policeman son who committed suicide. Ethan, an IRS agent in "Mr. Norton's Wart Hog," decides to take a bribe...next time. In "Trompe L'Oeil," Sheila decides to visit her mother as a hurricane approaches. All of the stories are written so well that the reader believes the author was really there. The stories are about relationships, from crazy mother and daughter to crazy man and two women, to homemaker and homeless. They are careful, thoughtful and compassionate. Lefer is not afraid to tell as well as show, and she proves that it's the right thing to do a lot of the time.

Diane Lefer must be one of the greatest uncelebrated talents writing today, and surely her latest collection of stories, "Very Much Like Desire" is to date her best published work. These stories reflect a shocking precision and unwavering originality -- of language, of feeling (always full of feeling and anti-sentimental --what a rarity!), of moral vision. This collection reads with the sureness of a master, and also the constant yearning (as reflected in all her desperate, failed, WISE characters) of a still-hopeful outsider, who hasn't given up singing to the heavens, though the heavens don't seem to notice.