cover image Emergency Calls

Emergency Calls

Gary Fincke. University of Missouri Press, $19.95 (144pp) ISBN 978-0-8262-1075-3

Trouble, real and imagined, permeates the stories in this uneven collection. The main characters, almost all of whom are middle-aged men, each have some trouble on their hands: a dying mother, a son with a penchant for DWI, a wife with an unusual allergy. In many cases there is illness or death in the family. This sameness is so pervasive that it becomes the collection's Achilles' heel, as the worries and woes of these too-similar men run together. At its best, Fincke's (For Keepsies) finely tuned dialogue brings a scene and its characters alive, as when a father chides his grown-up son in ""Keeping Nice"": ""He doesn't have to come back anymore if that's how he wants to act."" Several of the stories are wonderfully insightful studies of family relationships; they suffer only from inclusion in this compilation, which robs them of their individuality. But others, particularly the overladen ""The History of Go-go Dancing,"" about a murder on the day of the Kent State killings, would not have held up in any presentation. (Aug.)