Novelist J. Robert Lennon's collection of 100 short-short stories, first published to critical acclaim in England in 2005, has enough variety to provide something for almost any reader. Averaging less than 21/2 pages long, these fictions display wry humor, striking irony, wit and an overall catalog of the warped psychology and illogic of contemporary Americans in an unnamed small university town, though it's likely to be Ithaca, N.Y., where the author resides, with its Cornell University and deep gorges.
In his own voice, the author presents himself in an introduction to this gathering. He is, like the voice that narrates his stories, a close observer, though more eccentric, if self-styled, than that narrator. The topics have something of the feel of archetypes; characters are almost never given names, their lives tending toward the generic. This also gives a somewhat summary feel to the collection. Most of these miniatures contain enough matter for full-length, perhaps novelistic, development and exploitation.
As for instance in "Copycats," wherein a student's death is mistaken for a suicide on the basis of a fragment of a note, inspiring a rash of copycat suicides. In "Lucid," the uncertain line between dreams and reality is blurred, if not crossed. "Kids" presents an imaginary hunt for imagined buried treasure conducted by neighborhood boys; it ends when a false cache is planted and discovered. In "Tool," a computer wizard comes to decide that a common carpenter's hammer surpasses the value of any electronics. "The Denim Touch" morphs from a father's bedtime story into a permanent rift between him and his daughter. "Two Professors" devote their careers to arguing the correct spelling of "gray" (or is it "grey"?). The final story, "Brevity," sums up this collection with a haiku that could have served as a telling epigraph for this book: Tiny Upstate town/Undergoes many changes/Nonetheless endures.
"Pieces for the Left Hand" is an easy read, and an impressive one given the author's obvious imaginative gift and deft prose. Some of these short fictional takes are memorable, some merely accomplished, and others come off as flat, or inconsequential, or opaque with regard to the author's intention. The short-short story is a challenge for any writer, because all fiction is narrative -- not so poetry -- and it's tough to construct an adequate narrative in so little available space.
Gordon Weaver is a Wisconsin-based writer.