Black Maps

April 29, 1996
Jauss's collection of nine finely worked stories charts with a reasonable degree of success the tricky shiftings of human life on the brink. The boundaries crossed include a father's madness and a son's silent betrayal of him in "Glossolalia"; a newsman's sin of omission as he willfully ignores and editorializes a stranger's pain when confronted in a fast-food restaurant ("The Late Man"); a woman's distant acquiescence to a second marriage and her secret ache for a life somehow bypassed ("Beautiful Ohio"); a foster child's confused pairing of his alcoholic mother's slip into detox and his own hidden crime of throwing rocks at the school's windows ("Firelight"). Jauss's strongest writing appears in "The Bigs," narrated in slightly pidgin English by a minor league pitcher from the Dominican Republic who must choose between his wife and child's happiness or his own need to make the majors before he can return to his home country a hero. In "Freeze," a young soldier in Vietnam steps on a mine that fails to explode and finds himself battling with the weight of living with a strange salvation, on borrowed time. Despite a slightly redundant style and themes, the small, sharply seen worlds Jauss creates do much to prove--as the opening quote by Milan Kundera attests--that "the border beyond which everything loses meaning... is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch."

April 1, 1996
The characters in Jauss' second collection of short stories inhabit a world of low-paying jobs, broken marriages, and parents who drink too much. Except for "Freeze," which takes place in Vietnam, all the stories are set in Middle America, somewhere between Virginia Beach and Bozeman, Montana. A common theme is self-destruction, which can take many forms. For the most part, Jauss is good at capturing the rhythms of everyday speech; his plain style reflects the ordinary lives of his characters. Several of the stories appeared previously in magazines, and two were selected for Pushcart Prize anthologies. For large fiction collections. ((Reviewed April 1, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)