THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN HEAVENS

A volume of literary novellas and short stories ponders death and God.

Heaven isn’t far away in this collection—but its proximity isn’t necessarily a good thing. The house of the title novella is home to the Rosenweigs, Polish Jews fresh from Hitler’s Europe, who seek to build a new life for themselves in upstate New York. The novella takes its name from the adjacent seven-story ramp used by workers at the local General Electric plant. The family’s youngest daughter, Davora, wants nothing more than to break out of the rigid future prescribed for her by her parents—even as strange religious visions cause her to question her sanity. A second novella, A Factotum in the Land of Palms, follows a former Florida real estate agent with loose morals who loses his job when his employer is investigated for human trafficking. The ex-agent moves to California looking to start over. There, he is thrown for a loop by the many disparate characters and philosophical traditions he encounters in and around Los Angeles. The accompanying short stories deal with aging and loss: A man in his 70s contemplating his life and legacy sees a phantom coffin on his lawn; a husband, whose health-nut wife just left him, stages a condiment-heavy feast for one. Morganstern’s prose is sharp and surprising. He’s able to capture his characters’ humanity with a few revealing descriptions, as here in A Factotum in the Land of Palms: “I stared at him, the guy I knew in college. The angle man as he was known because he was the self-proclaimed master at zeroing in on what benefited himself the most at any given moment. At least he did when he wasn’t drunk and hurling partially digested pizza and beer on the monuments in the quad.” The novellas have impressively expansive worlds, but both drag a bit, especially in comparison to the three short stories. Even so, the pieces are in conversation with one another, and the book works as a thoughtful, evolving meditation on grief and acceptance.

An imperfect but often arresting fiction collection.