KISSING IN MANHATTAN

A jumbled debut collection that offers up a mixed bag of Manhattan dwellers linked with one another through the Preemption, a brooding West Side apartment building.

Imagine collaboration between Gabriel García Márquez, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jay McInerney, and you have something of the flavor of these stories and their people—smart, trendy, clichéd, erotic, poignant, perverse, and larger than life. Six pieces combine into a kind of novella (“The Opals,” “Kissing In Manhattan,” “Duty,” “Telling It All To Otis,” “In Black,” and “The Green Balloon”), with the remaining five only tenuously joined to the whole. The “novella” concerns a domineering, sexually twisted Wall Streeter (Patrick) whose psyche was supposedly shattered in childhood by the accidental death of his brother. He delights in subtle bondage and collects women like trophies, one of them being Rally, a rather generic, pretty New York party girl. Patrick also makes visits to a priest in order secretly to scorn the Catholicism of his youth. Though rich, he has a roommate (James) who is his opposite: sweet, innocent, and insecure. Brutal complications ensue when Rally and James fall in love, but then the narrative trails off into sentimentality, predictability, and a strained allegory of the struggle between good and evil. The other tales concern men who dominate and confuse women (“Checkers and Donna”), women who dominate and confuse men (“The Smoker,” “Serendipity”), a tender bathing ritual (“Jacob’s Bath”), and an effective farce (“Fourth Angry Mouse”). These are stories that achieve their successes, when they do, through the deft craftsmanship of their prose and the surprises they spring on the reader. But their characters remain two-dimensional, existing mainly to serve semifantastical plot twists. Since they’re unrealized, their reappearance in different stories and at the Preemption feels like a mechanical linking device rather than a progressive development toward anything larger.

A first effort by a talented writer that tries too hard to be more than a collection.