DISCOVERING AMERICA

In spite of an innocuous title, Wieland (The Names of the Lost, 1992) employs rich shapes and colors, finely hewed thematic details, and a heart full of a rebel's sympathy in the ten long stories collected here. Most fan out from Brookhaven, Georgia, where early stories depict the lives of the town's insurgent characters, including a proper young schoolgirl with a crush on a sweet redneck boy; a kindly, well-liked widow discovered by her daughter to be having an affair with a black lumberyard worker who helps the daughter build treehouses (``Lessons and Carols''); and the founder of a brides' consulting service who refuses to marry the man who underwrote her business (``Aisle Help''). Later stories move from Georgia to Texas and California but sustain their pungent sense of rebellion as a centrifugal force, even in diaspora: a grown Georgian daughter spirits her father away from his circling creditors in St. Louis (``Close to Falling''); a pregnant teenager runs away to Texas and learns to shoot (``Called by Name''). And, in the long, richly modulated title story, two hill-country teenagers enact the classic case of a doomed love affair as they roam from Texas to Utah and then the Oregon coast, looking for jobs, a home—a safe place to land. Well-crafted and original—a welcome short-story debut.