Short Stories
ISBN: 0-89924-047-X
Paper: $11.00

The title of Fred Pfeil's first collection of stories suggests a transcendence his characters seldom attain. Indeed, ''Shine On'' records the peculiar diminutions of American life during the 1970's and the way a shrinking economy pinches the imagination as well as the purse. Whether they're ''scratching out a living on a Pennsylvania farm . . . [ or ] trying to be happy as a foreman at the tire plant back in Akron,'' Mr. Pfeil's men and women slog through lives that seem to resist yielding up the barest satisfaction. Two stories, ''Skeeter's Last Reflections'' and ''The Collected Works of Brown,'' telescope the lifetimes of their protagonists into mosaics of pain. In the first, an alcoholic factory worker is run over by a car in the final paragraph, while in the second a man endures a numbing 45 years as a washroom janitor. Some readers may find these small-town portraits almost schematically dreary. But as a narrator Mr. Pfeil is too sharply observant to make his characters into martyrs; instead, his heightened observation becomes a form of compassion. Several other stories examine blue-collar life from the more complicated perspective of the small-town boy who's gone to the city. The best of these, ''The Quality of Light in Maine,'' represents the author's most accomplished work. As he measures the currents that flow among a trio of lovers and friends, Mr. Pfeil's writing takes on the qualities of the light in the story's title: its clarity, its fine distinctions and the luminous surprise of its perspectives.

- The New York Times