House of Heroes

August 5, 1988
In this first collection of stories by a writer who has won several prestigious awards, the perspective is largely shaped by localethe Great Lakes region. Set amid dairyland vistas, ``The Meadow Bell'' has as protagonist emotionally disturbed farmer-become-cheesemaker, Lakeund Kramer. Filled with guilt and loneliness, he is comforted by envisioning a nonexistent son because ``the dream and the want needed to fit together to make a good sound.'' In the title story, we are taken inside a group home for adolescent boys who exhibit violent behavior. Along with the narrator, Laura Wold, their night counselor, we experience an understanding tinged with fear. A perception of the lives led by the odd, or the often humiliated outsider, is brilliantly focused in ``Anna in a Small Town,'' the story of a woman whose giantism, ``the enormous fact of her,'' is a challenge to comformists. ``The Gate House'' tells of two aged, bibulous sisters, their existence hidden in a churchyard cottage, who instructs a young college student that ``pain could be constant and rhythmic . . . that the comforter needed to find the rhythm and know it.'' In others of the 10 stories here that disclose the small victories of those often considered outside the pale, there is power and subtle craftsmanship.