LAST YEAR'S JESUS

Don't be fooled by the playful title: the Polish-Catholic working class in Detroit and its environs, as depicted in Slezak's debut collection, is a largely gloomy heritage. Fractured families, alcoholism, dead-end jobs and—above all—a tendency toward inertia keep Slezak's characters rooted in a city of "busted-up businesses" or in "dull and modest" Michigan towns. In the best and liveliest stories, acerbic first-person voices puncture the malaise, such as when awkward college student Theresa Jagielski takes readers through a twist on a morality play that probes race and generational differences with subtle irony in the title story. In "Here in Car City," a young woman who opens the Pensione Detroit (an "inexpensive European-style hotel") in a run-down neighborhood forges an unforgettable bond with an industrious Polish hustler, and "If You Treat Things Right" showcases the bitter, knowing sass of middle-aged Jenny, a lifelong auto-plant worker contending with her sister's embarrassing infatuation with a college boy. Third-person narration serves Slezak less well; the remaining stories, though admirably loaded with details of Detroit's urban blight and the inner workings of its primary struggling industry, begin to suffer from a tonal and thematic sameness (dead or dying siblings, for example, are featured in three of the 10 stories). Such careful layering both authenticates the material and dulls the senses. Readers who have been missing gritty realism will find something to latch onto here, and the choice of place—which Slezak renders vividly—is both familiar and foreign enough to attract. (Apr.)