Moving North

By Paul Gray

THE NEXT NEW WORLD

by Bob Shacochis

Crown; 209 pages; $16.95

In Easy in the Islands (1985), Bob Shacochis proved he could spin colorful tales about life, chiefly low, in the Caribbean. His exotic settings and laid- back prose won critical praise and an American Book Award for a first book of fiction. He might be excused for trying to repeat his earlier success, but that turns out not to be necessary. Only two of the eight stories in The Next New World take place on tropical islands, and while perfectly fine, they are not the best things in this collection. A typical Shacochis story is still likely to have a large body of water somewhere in the vicinity, but the author is moving north and onto the mainland.

Squirrelly's Grouper, for example, takes place on Hatteras, on North Carolina's Outer Banks, and deals with a reclusive commercial fisherman who hauls in a record-breaking specimen, a Warsaw grouper the "size of an Oldsmobile." The narrator, who owns the local marina, relates all the subsequent excitement and then warns, "Now if you don't already know, this story winds up with a punch from so far out in left field there's just no way you can see it coming, but I can't apologize for that." Nor, given the artful conclusion, should he. Stolen Kiss moves up the coastline a bit to Rehobeth, where a longtime Washington bureaucrat now works as a year-round handyman and lives apart from his wife of 39 years. "Thank God," he muses, "for letting us be apart and at peace with the loneliness," although his serenity proves more fragile than he wants to believe.

Shacochis, 37, shows an ability uncommon among younger writers to treat sensitively, without condescension, the perils of middle and old age. Celebrations of the New World portrays a Fourth of July family gathering in Philadelphia, the first full-scale meeting of the narrator's relatives and those of his wife. The scene is crowded and confusing at first, but the focus eventually comes to rest on the father-in-law, Bernie Alazar, who is experiencing the progressive deterioration of Alzheimer's disease. Nothing can save Bernie in the long run, but this story, the best in the book, provides moments of touching recognition and redemption. Shacochis inserts, with no visible effort, an extraordinary amount of detail into his short fiction. The fashion in stories these days runs toward attenuated apercus. None of these will be found here, only pieces that are unstylishly generous and memorable.