THIS TIME, THAT PLACE

A six-decade retrospective of short fiction from an accomplished Canadian American writer.

The first two-thirds of this book can feel old-fashioned, but mostly in a good way. The stories have an autobiographical buzz and intensity; many feature an adolescent perpetual outsider, son of a mythologized, largely absent salesman father and a mother who, despite her nearness, always seems more distant and unknowable. The stories are as peripatetic as the family, which moves constantly, never assimilating, from racist Florida backwaters around World War II to industrial cities like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Then, in several stories, there's an abrupt move to Canada (in one case sparked by the father having assaulted someone). Several portraits feature an observer-protagonist who wants, by thinking about un-self-conscious doers like his father or uncle and the wide swath they cut, to convince himself he has grandeur in him, that he is "not just the timid academic son of [his] mother's rectitude." These stories cover ground not only geographically. They are also crowded with character and incident, always fiercely and smartly observed; Blaise is, as Margaret Atwood puts it in her foreword, "the eye at the keyhole...the ear at the door." Later, we follow a version of this protagonist to Montreal, where he is a young father, husband, and writer in love with the city and its flux, diversity, unpredictability, and cross-pollination. Many of the final stories, set in California and Europe, feature an Indian family (Blaise was married for decades to the writer Bharati Mukherjee, until her death in 2017) and another, only slightly less autobiographical approach to what dislocation feels like. What is it like to be a citizen of the world who nevertheless finds himself, again and again, in a strange, small space or a strange, small self that must for now be home?

Blaise has gathered here a smart, sprawling collection of stories about family, rootlessness, and identity.