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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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011689
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01168900.074
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1990-09-17
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BOOKS, Page 72Moving North
THE NEXT NEW WORLD
by Bob Shacochis
Crown; 209 pages; $16.95
In Easy in the Islands (1985), Bob Shacochis proved he could
spin colorful tales about life, chiefly low, in the Caribbean. His
exotic settings and laid-back prose won critical praise and an
American Book Award for a first book of fiction. He might be
excused for trying to repeat his earlier success, but that turns
out not to be necessary. Only two of the eight stories in The Next
New World take place on tropical islands, and while perfectly fine,
they are not the best things in this collection. A typical
Shacochis story is still likely to have a large body of water
somewhere in the vicinity, but the author is moving north and onto
the mainland.
Squirrelly's Grouper, for example, takes place on Hatteras, on
North Carolina's Outer Banks, and deals with a reclusive commercial
fisherman who hauls in a record-breaking specimen, a Warsaw grouper
the "size of an Oldsmobile." The narrator, who owns the local
marina, relates all the subsequent excitement and then warns, "Now
if you don't already know, this story winds up with a punch from
so far out in left field there's just no way you can see it coming,
but I can't apologize for that." Nor, given the artful conclusion,
should he. Stolen Kiss moves up the coastline a bit to Rehobeth,
where a longtime Washington bureaucrat now works as a year-round
handyman and lives apart from his wife of 39 years. "Thank God,"
he muses, "for letting us be apart and at peace with the
loneliness," although his serenity proves more fragile than he
wants to believe.
Shacochis, 37, shows an ability uncommon among younger writers
to treat sensitively, without condescension, the perils of middle
and old age. Celebrations of the New World portrays a Fourth of
July family gathering in Philadelphia, the first full-scale meeting
of the narrator's relatives and those of his wife. The scene is
crowded and confusing at first, but the focus eventually comes to
rest on the father-in-law, Bernie Alazar, who is experiencing the
progressive deterioration of Alzheimer's disease. Nothing can save
Bernie in the long run, but this story, the best in the book,
provides moments of touching recognition and redemption. Shacochis
inserts, with no visible effort, an extraordinary amount of detail
into his short fiction. The fashion in stories these days runs
toward attenuated apercus. None of these will be found here, only
pieces that are unstylishly generous and memorable.