Humanistic Purveyor

It's easy to like the lilt in Martin Golan's writing: his word choices are crisp and his tone effervescent. The twelve stories in his collection Where Things Are When You Lose Them snap, crackle, and pop in their examination of modern travails. Suburbia is, for the most part, Golan's milieu, and it's one he negotiates well. His characters tend to be white and affluent, and the rigors of the working day or making ends meet are not such a concern. Rather, Golan takes on matters of the heart in times of testy human behavior. He uses hefty topics—ranging from sexual etiquette to domestic abuse to the grim specter of assisted living—to catapult his people into their moment of reckoning.

Golan's greatest strength shows when the characters talk; he has a fine ear for the way folks express themselves when they're damaged, or trying to break through, or seeking to deflect. His dialogue is economic and his use of dialects and teenage slang, which is no easy thing to render and into which he delves several times, is convincing.

Many of the stories have a straightforward structure: a phrase or image is introduced, used symbolically to counterpoint the action, and then returns to wrap things up in the denouement. The typical narrator is a middle-aged male, looking back at a life-defining episode. This perspective can be poignant, as in "The Shape of Water," in which the protagonist reminisces about a love lost amongst the emotional debris left by swinging couples in the 60s; the stirring image of his lover diving off a boat into the ocean is its central metaphor. "When Annie Fell Off the Mountain" uses its freeze-frame of a woman (also suspended in mid-air) to draw us into a story of unwanted pregnancy in the days before legal abortion, which, despite the gravity of its subject, allows for some dark comedy in the confusion that comes from juggling too many agendas and bad directions.

Golan is most comfortable writing about men. In "The Loneliness of Men," married Jonathan joins his bachelor pal Roger for an uneasy night on the town at a bar "that smells damply of sex and regret." That footloose Roger is playing the bon vivant to deny a grave illness comes as a well-timed surprise that changes the mood of the piece from fratboy frivolity to one of melancholy. The pair of male confidantes in "The Perfect Woman" strolls through a snowy neighborhood by night, ruminating about collapsing marriages. The topic turns to their notion of the ideal woman, a checklist of attributes that reaches its crescendo when they happen upon a woman undressing in a nearby house. They spy on her, undetected, and the story becomes a potent allegory for being outside of life and its rewards.

When Golan writes about women, he's less certain, and the results are often more interesting. "Making Sandwiches" is a wry piece in which Sharon, a housewife, busies herself with the minutiae of everyday life and casual flirtations to buck up her courage for the day's true purpose, when she'll confront her Alzhemier's-afflicted mother with devastating family news to cleanse her own soul. In "The Cicadas are Throbbing," Golan creates heartbreaking empathy for Carolyn, a newly divorced woman who finds herself the social equal to (and rival of) her budding teenage daughter, in a wonderfully volatile situation that the author handles deftly.

Some of the stories are experimental. The ironically titled "Intimacy" is all dialogue, just cabbies sitting around talking, one fresh from a fare that he may have helped escape the commission of a murder. "Nora, Standing Naked" offers a multi-testimony collage ostensibly about breast cancer that ends up being mostly about, well, breasts. Several characters weigh in on Nora's physical endowments. The various male voices come off as blunt, in contrast to Nora's own, and its revelation that, despite the welcome attention from men, she is more...