YOU CAN SLEEP WHILE I DRIVE

Novelist Wieland’s second collection (Discovering America, 1993) comprises nine long, earnest, sometimes elegant stories that, unfortunately, keep the reader at a distance. In the novella-length title piece, a young man dying of AIDS meets the father who abandoned him as a baby. They bond to some extent, and the father teaches the son to drive. With all these stories the point of view, time, and voice shift frequently, and the digressions are plentiful, ranging from insightful to annoying. The most interesting tale is “Purgatory,” where a senile father tells some terrible truths about parenting to his willful, bitchy daughter, who is determined to become a parent. In “Salt Lake,” when a woman’s mother dies, she discovers that the man she thought was her uncle is really her father. “Irradiation” depicts a woman who stays in touch with the disturbed teenaged girl who caused her husband’s death. Several stories are also very melancholy in tone, as evidenced by this passage from “The Loop, The Snow, Their Daughters, The Rain—: “Each wondered, privately, why the whole world did not fall apart, did not drown in tears like this, sadness that could never be soothed, only diminished for a time by a cocktail, an in-flight movie, distance, time, speed, weather.” The prose in the complicated and deeply sad “Gray’s Anatomy” has echoes of Conrad. Three elderly men meet in an emergency ward, each accompanied by a sick or injured child. When one of the children dies, her father ponders, “We ought to have traded places, her damaged body for my good one. Hers that was not big enough to heal itself, for mine that was so large and empty on the inside, and like all bodies, so utterly dark and unknowable.” Filled with extended passages of delicate and poetic language, but the pleasure quotient is low.