Emergency calls : stories /

Trouble, real and imagined, permeates the stories in this uneven collection. The main characters, almost all of whom are middle-aged men, each have some trouble on their hands: a dying mother, a son with a penchant for DWI, a wife with an unusual allergy. In many cases there is illness or death in the family. This sameness is so pervasive that it becomes the collection's Achilles' heel, as the worries and woes of these too-similar men run together. At its best, Fincke's (For Keepsies) finely tuned dialogue brings a scene and its characters alive, as when a father chides his grown-up son in "Keeping Nice": "He doesn't have to come back anymore if that's how he wants to act." Several of the stories are wonderfully insightful studies of family relationships; they suffer only from inclusion in this compilation, which robs them of their individuality. But others, particularly the overladen "The History of Go-go Dancing," about a murder on the day of the Kent State killings, would not have held up in any presentation. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Ten stories of a piece with Fincke's first collection, For Keepsies (1993). These are, that is, realistic stories about suburban families, all set in Pennsylvania and featuring a male protagonist who, while not completely ineffectual, is paralyzed in some way. By the randomness of the Universe, perhaps: In the memorable, understated ``Faculty X,'' a son patiently helps his mother face Alzheimer's and her impending death. In ``Callback,'' a husband and wife watch helplessly as their teenaged son flings himself toward disaster; despairingly, they recall scenes from his seemingly happy childhood. Fincke occasionally tries to break out of his down-in-the-dumps realism with a slight metaphysical touch. ``The Marfa Lights,'' for instance, concerns a man whose wife develops an allergy to electricity, and the pair's search to discover whether her affliction is somehow magical. But for the most part Fincke's tales are gloomy. In the ambitious but flawed ``Siding,'' yet another ineffectual father tries to make sense of his son's desire to become a woman. The siding on the father's house is peeling away, and he can't deal with it, nor can he deal with the domestic crises oppressing him. Least of all can he deal with his son, and, like the story, he too flounders. In the somewhat less despairing title story, a variation of ``Callback,'' a father pulls his teenaged daughter back from disaster and, perhaps, brings her to adulthood, through nothing more than his exercise of loving patience. Fincke's most technically accomplished piece is ``Darwin in the City,'' about a man going blind and the visions of disaster he entertains, à la Walter Mitty, as his anxiety overcomes him. On balance, a solid--if almost unrelentingly grim--collection.