NOT THE SAME RIVER

Polf tracks moments of personal change in this collection of literary short fiction.

A woman hires a Romanian caretaker for her mother, who is slipping into dementia, only to become jealous of the bond her mother forms with the charismatic immigrant. A man moves to 1960s San Francisco to become a writer and takes a job at the city zoo, which leads to a standoff between his primary literary (and romantic) rival and a pair of lions. A nervous boy spends an initiatory night hanging out with older teens, drinking booze and siphoning gasoline. (“He held the other end of the hose to his mouth with his thumb an inch from the end, just like he had learned, and began to suck, tentatively at first, then with more confidence. He could feel pressure at the other end of the hose; that should mean the gasoline was coming.”) A man inadvertently causes a car accident by stepping off a curb, though in the aftermath he can’t get anyone to appreciate the guilt he feels. Across 15 stories, Polf dramatizes everyday moments of crisis and transition, from a broken toilet that needs a plumber to a rainstorm that requires a mom to pick her son up from school. The author’s prose elevates the often-mundane problems in the stories to dramatic—and sometimes comedic—heights. Here, the man who causes the accident grasps for cosmological metaphors to explain it: “If he hadn’t stepped off the curb at precisely that moment, Miriam would have either already passed by or would not yet have arrived…It could be explained only in cosmic terms, Marlowe concluded, like the random chance of a particle splitting an atom and the ensuing explosion devastating everything.” Not every piece lands, and many of the tales would be improved if they pushed a bit deeper into their characters’ crises. The worlds are always richly drawn, however, and Polf proves himself a capable recorder of the human psyche.

Probing, realistic stories of aging, learning, failing, and growing.