Books

A Better Angel
By Chris Adrian, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, 227 pp.

Young people populate most of the nine stories in Chris Adrian's new collection, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and Esquire. Those youngsters search for answers to age-old questions without any more success than their elders, especially in the medical community of supposed healers.

There's a sense of magical realism about some of the stories. In "The Sum of Our Parts," the essence of a suicide victim floats though the pathology lab of a large hospital as she looks for answers to her condition from the technicians on duty. A youngster contends with disturbing flashes of bodies falling from twin towers in "The Vision of Peter Damien." The title story (and one of the collection's masterworks) follows a profligate pediatrician as he tries to comfort his dying father while being chastised by a guardian angel.

Story subtly informs story: a violent, moving account of a father facing the world he has left for his 9-year-old son in the wake of 9/11 is followed by another in which a Civil War re-enactor contemplates life in the wake of the death of a brother.

The strongest stories, however, are those that deal head-on with young people. A boy, whose physician father's plane has crashed in a botched drug deal, finds solace of sorts speeding around the countryside with his substitute teacher. A teenager with a birth defect looks for the love she suspects her condition precludes as she glides down hospital hallways on her IV pole composing a children's guide to animal diseases.

Two heartbreaking stories round out the collection. "Stab" concerns a surviving conjoined twin who accompanies a fifth-grade classmate on her killing spree even as he hopes she can help him reconnect with his dead brother. "Why Antichrist?" follows a teenager who designates a friend of hers the Antichrist. As such he can be held responsible for her father's death on 9/11 and provide answers that she desperately needs "because he's somebody in the know. Right?"

What moves and unsettles most about the children (perhaps even the adults) in this startling group of stories is that they want to embrace the ordinary. Their world simply won't allow them to.

Chris Adrian is neither sanguine nor maudlin about the likelihood of redemption. He refuses to explore what he terms "all the late, new sadness" as either hero or victim. He's just looking for answers like everybody else.

Steven Whitton is a Professor of English at Jacksonville State University.