Wet places at noon1997

"I had been wrong: love was not gone; it had been there, on two legs in front of me, and I, breathless and tongue-tied as an idiot, then stumbled backward from the door, the sidewalk rolling under my feet, trying to say good-bye." All the men in Lee Abbott's new collection of stories are stumbling backward from the door, trying to say good-bye yet still making and breaking promises as the door shuts for the last time - or does it?

Castaways on their own turf, Abbott's devil-may-care men are given to spectacular, ruinous acts; contradictorily passive and energetic, they join together to fight their crazed interior and exterior wars. Abbott's community is pure Americana, a wild world inhabited by gloriously street-smart smartasses: overeducated, underemployed men mourning for the confident...