Wingtips: Stories by Avery Chenoweth

With earnest lyricism and emotional accuracy, the nine linked stories of Chenoweth's debut collection graph the evolution of the Goodpasture family. The dramatis personae introduced by the opening story recur: the outcast, troublemaking Stuart; his brittle mother, Carol, shattered when her husband deserts her for another woman; the virile bully, Uncle Jack; and Granelle, the doddering grandmother. From the chrysalis of ""Powerman,"" which takes place in 1968 at the annual family retreat in muggy, graveyard-rich Beersheba Springs, Tenn., emerges a chain of events that ends when the near-30-year-old Stuart decides that ""Here was where [he] would begin."" The tales' geographical range--Martha's Vineyard, Jacksonville, Princeton, and Washington, D.C.--operates as a metaphor for the scope of the characters' emotional trials. Shocking revelations about divorce, paternity, sex and family form the substratum of Stuart's coming of age, while glimpses into the lives of his siblings, Jay and Brian, round out the family's difficult relationships. While these strung-together short stories sometimes feel like an undernourished novel, the intensity of the language and the grace of the narrative arc should earn this new writer praise. (Jan.)