You Can Sleep While I Drive: Stories

In the interest of full disclosure, I've known Liza Wieland since we were children. But even if I'd never met her, I'd recognize her significant talent. In all of her stories and in her novel (The Names of the Lost), Liza exhibits tender feelings for her characters and for their struggle to connect with others. Yes, some of the stories are tinged with sadness, but they're also buoyed by kindness. Way to go, Liza!

The stories of Wieland's second collection reveal a series of displaced characters longing for intimacy in the wide open spaces of the West. Often, what these characters find is that they are not alone, but joined by a series of presences, ghosts that weave themselves through the nine stories, haunting these characters with reminders of pasts they do not fully understand. Irradiation, for example, begins with the death of the narrator's husband at the hands of Christine, a teenage cancer patient. When Christine recovers, an infatuation develops, forcing the narrator to befriend Christine, follow her to New York, and eventually lift her life from her, stealing a career and a boyfriend in the process. In Salt Lake, Em plays witness to the deterioration of her mother's health, and in the process learns of her mother's past, including the story of her own father. These revelations hint toward a legacy Em ultimately cannot bear to inherit. Ghosts also haunt the narrator of Gray's Anatomy, the man who almost invented Nylon. He and two other men - one the inventor of Styrofoam and the other a Disney animator - meet in the hospital waiting room while on vacation on the California coast, in a story that creates a beautiful dance between their histories and the sometimes uncertain promise of a future for the ailing children these men cherish. The wide open spaces are not always wide enough. In the stories Laramie and Purgatory, the narrators find themselves on long car trips with lovers they have grown distant from. As the narrator of Purgatory ruefully dreams of escape all the way to their destination, the family home, only to find the chaos that exists there somehow empowers her to dismiss her lover. After a blowout on the way to Yellowstone, the narrator of Laramie and her lover become further delayed by Al Laudermilk, his poet sister, and their senile father, who open their lives and offer a vision of how one gets trapped in Laramie, a vision that frightens the narrator out of love. In the title story, an absent father named Mack travels across the country to the Bay Area at the request of his dying son. Their sprint of a relationship transforms both men, leading ultimately to a dream-like state of motion that Mack almost cannot control. Wieland balances this longing and sorrow with a sense of hope - filtered through the lives of children. In Halloween, several neighbor women reveal private childhood secrets, which begin to sink in for a young girl as she learns to cope with the death of her father and the motherly responsibility she seems to feel for her younger brother. In the wonderfully lyrical The Loop, The Snow, Their Daughters, The Rain, two young families enjoy a trip to Chicago while their young daughters delight in discovering the power of language. This power is at the center of Wieland's prose and her command of the craft of storytelling. In Laramie, her narrator recollect

This second short story collection is full of the same beautiful language that fills Liza Wieland's other prose. She carries us across state lines and into the minds of characters -- all of them filled with a haunting sadness that we come to feel ourselves. The stories are gorgeous in their telling and the voices, at times, begin to almost sing in your head. In the title story, as in others, we are witness to moments of beauty that seem monumental and bittersweet in the tragic lives of the characters. A wonderful book to make your way through, you will often find yourself stopping to reread a line or to soak in the full impact of an image.

It moved me, caused me to think, and many times made me sad. There is a thread of melancholy running through Wieland's work, a kind of hovering sadness that tends to move in closer in some stories and sometimes hover farther off in the background in others, yet it is always there. This quality seems to me to be one of expressed intelligence. I think the more aware we are of the world around us, the more empathetic we are, even in our happiest moments, to the pain, injustice, and bitterness in life. And this, for me at least, often makes itself felt in a kind of melancholy or sadness that can never be quite defined, never quite confronted, but simply known.I feel Wieland's work has always had a way of dealing with the day to day sublteties, the little battles won and lost, that is not only realistic, but intelligently observed and quietly expressed.p.s. If the reviewer from Kirkus can't even figure out how to use quotes and apostrophes, how intelligent of a reader can s/he be?