The Kind I'm Likely to Get: A Collection

Foster's first short story collection captures the blunt ethos of underachievers. Characters are cursed with alienated souls, temp jobs and nowhere relationships. Worse, most are approaching, or have crossed into, the dread 30s. The 14 stories center emblematically on the brief relationship between John and Mary. In ""Indelible,"" John, a man whose entrepreneurial ambition is to market a certain graffiti doodle he's come up with--""a locomotive with cockroach legs""--begins an ambivalent, virtually affectless affair with Mary, which ends anticlimactically. In ""A Story About Someone Else,"" readers follow Mary as she drifts from San Francisco (after having published a scathing newspaper piece about her relationship with John), back to New York, where loose-cannon John finds her and breaks her nose. In ""Running in Place,"" Mary runs into John again, and ends up apologizing instead of confronting him. Peripheral characters in some stories become protagonists in others, illustrating somewhat drearily the ""small-world effect,"" the high probability of overlap and awkward cocktail party run-ins for urban lovers and their exes. Foster traces his characters from the East and West coasts, with many dead-on details: the coffee shops, Kinko's and boring parties found in different cities. Drifters and neurotics, wanna-be artists and tepid couples find themselves in various cycles of being flirted with, dumped, laid and fired. The narratives can become annoying in their self-important inertia, especially in the deliberately awkward, shallow dialogues between faux friends, but there are many pessimistic, plangent truths to be gleaned from Foster's grim adventurers. Author tour. (July) FYI: Foster was the editor of The KGB Bar Reader.