People Tell Me Things: Stories

This endearingly chatty debut collection of short stories by freelance journalist Finkle focuses on variations of a confident young writer's post-Ivy League life in New York City.%C2%A0The assorted male narrators of these episodes are sometimes straight, sometimes gay, but uniformly well-connected in 1960s Manhattan. There are meetings with "hot, young director[s]," lunches with celebrated novelists, and a Central Park run-in with famed and fated photographer Diane Arbus.%C2%A0It would all be very interesting if it wasn't so flat-footed and self-congratulatory. As one story's narrator puts it: "I'd gone to the best schools and sailed through them with an odd-ball combination of conscientiousness and insouciance, I'd come to the world's best city where in green-apple-quick-time I'd located an affordable apartment to rent and landed, hot off the swanky streets, a hotsy-totsy little position at a well-read magazine where they liked adding new old-school-tie boys at the low end of the masthead." If tone is one problem, another is language. For example, midway through another episode, another incarnation of the book's first-person narrator explains, "This, by the way, was late-ish on an early spring afternoon when the trees are still a matte celadon and the tulips are trumpeting." Unchecked, the whimsy of Finkle's florid trills tires and grates.%C2%A0 There are human and tender moments in this collection%E2%80%94and some brightly sketched characters%E2%80%94but in the end the author fails to explain why the things people tell him really matter. (Nov.)