This slender collection (a novella and five stories) by a young gay author illuminates a passage from utter despair to a complicated kind of transcendence by which the individual at last comes to realize the beauty and importance of life. The centerpiece of the collection, a novella entitled ``The Listener,'' decribes this moment of grace as it comes to two people living in a small, decrepit town on the Northern California coast. One is an eccentric, emotionally volatile woman, Jane, who lives in slovenly disarray with her young son. The other is the narrator, Paul, a professor from San Francisco who has moved to a friend's cabin in the country to recover from the long, exhausting death of a close friend. In letters to his sister, Paul begins to realize his own buried grief and anxiety. Between letters we follow Jane, who is increasingly obsessed with her son's health--to the extent that she brings both the boy and herself to a medical crisis. Jane experiences a miraculous transformation at the hands of a stranger who convinces her to surrender her pain and loneliness and find a new self--and with it, the power to accept and to heal. After enduring his own crisis of faith, Paul finds his salvation with Jane. Similar themes of acceptance and redemption drive Huston's stories, giving the book an overall thematic unity and spiritual grace. Huston has beautifully identified a central awareness of contemporary life. (Oct.)
