MARKED MEN

Novelist White (The Blind Side of the Heart, 1999, etc.) offers an uneven collection of 12 stories about ordinary people suddenly blind-sided by the vagaries of life.

In the masterfully told “Disturbances,” a North Carolina doctor and part-time medical examiner is called out in the middle of the night to officially pronounce dead a young man shot in the chest by his Cherokee Indian wife. Inside the mobile home, Doc encounters the stricken woman trying to nurse her baby—and suddenly he has a different job to perform. In “Burn Patterns,” an arson investigator shares a six-hour drive across dark, icy Pennsylvania with an angry, snake-fondling vagabond named Rosemarie. In “Crossing,” recently widowed Margaret confronts her loneliness on a queasy ferry ride across Long Island Sound. Meanwhile, a landscaper has a most unpleasant task in “Ray’s Shoes”: he has to tell his neighbor, a grieving widower with two young daughters, that he’s becoming too emotionally attached to his own wife. “The Cardiologist’s House” takes us inside the sad life of a retired high-school teacher who, after two heart attacks, must watch from his living-room window as his neighbor and former lover struggles through a new affair. A pair of stories touchingly explore the fears of fatherhood: In “The Smell of Life,” Ira is awakened from a nightmare about his father's death when his newborn daughter cries; in “Instincts,” a widowed father has to explain the facts of life to his daughters during an outing to the zoo. A few pieces fall back on stock characters and tired situations: “Marked Men,” for example, is yet another comparison of Vietnam to WWII. The listless and rambling “Three Whacks a Buck” takes us back to the early ’60s, when fears of nuclear bombs and boys troubled the hearts of preadolescent girls.

Despite the occasional clinker, this bittersweet world of average folks just trying to get by is well worth the visit.