Very Much Like Desire

Lefer's socially conscious characters cope with a myriad of contemporary moral issues illuminating their foibles, prejudices and humanity in this deeply moving second collection of stories (after The Circles I Move In). The book establishes a mood of suspense as the characters wend their way into the crux of their moral dilemmas: in ""Yasemin,"" a woman, recently dumped by her married boss, embarks on a charitable but misguided mission to Turkey to help financially the wife of a political prisoner. In ""Keys to the Kingdom,"" a white couple go to a political meeting in the South Bronx, and the woman, Jody, feels unsafe parking their car on the street. She also feels out of place and self-conscious about her participation in the enterprise, which involves donating money to arm South African revolutionaries. Lefer does an enviable job of packing the stories with plausible detail and chooses to leave many of her conclusions ambivalent, perhaps necessarily. ""Up There"" concerns an anthropologist, Dr. Hadley Marshall, who's returned from six years of fieldwork in South America to make a Midwestern speaking tour. The alienated academic attracts an unstable woman named Luanne, who says to Hadley, ""I will follow you.... Follow. As in worship."" All the inexorably creepy elements of a Flannery O'Connor story are present, but the expected emotional wallop is never delivered. In ""Mr. Norton's Wart Hog,"" however, Lefer fully delineates the story of a married accountant who befriends a hard-luck Filipino woman and ends up using her teenage, Americanized daughter to blunt the force of his marital and professional dissatisfaction. Despite each story's intensely political message and ethical quandary, these aspects never get heavy-handed, and Lefer's often oblique subtlety is skillfully balanced by her clear, sympathetic characterizations. (Sept.)