Life in the Air Ocean: Stories

This powerful debut collection of nine interconnected stories reads like a novel and offers almost four dark decades in the lives of the dysfunctional Mowrys of Carville, Tenn. The characters' behavior--sometimes self-destructive, sometimes cruel--is lodged in a legacy of familial misery. ""Boy Wonder,"" set in the 1930s, offers a glimpse of Daniel Mowry's troubled childhood. In reaction to his depressed mother's rejection, he violently throws himself off his porch steps in an attempt to fly. His physical pain mixes with pride at ""bearing up under torment."" Daniel's reaction to his mother's coldness translates into a successful career as a refrigeration expert by the 1950s; at home, his wife, Iris, takes solace in alcohol. In the title story, Iris, sunk into postpartum depression, neglects her infant daughter, drinks herself into a stupor and purposely slides off the roof of her house. In another tale, Daniel, frustrated when Iris has passed out drunk, sexually abuses four-year-old Ruth and tells the child the resulting blood is from a fall; later, Ruth throws herself down the stairs, trying to discover the meaning of her father's ""tricky words."" Daniel's job temporarily relocates the Mowrys to Bogota, Colombia, and in ""Cloudland,"" which takes place in the 1960s, Daniel sinks further into the mire by sexually abusing his daughters Ruth and Monica. The last two stories portray the girls grown into troubled women in the 1970s: Ruth, disaffected and terrified of intimacy, is addicted to casual sex with strangers; Monica has a caring husband and begins to glimpse happiness. If Foley relies too much on self-inflicted physical injury to suggest her characters' emotional pain, she deftly conveys the most searing details of their lives just as skillfully as she documents their subsequent numbing despair and defiance. Agent, Irene Skolnick. (Feb.)