Comfort Zones

There are few consolations in Donoghue's first collection of stories, which deal with poverty, alcoholism, fear and the desperate, small-town Canadian longing to be somewhere--anywhere--else. Most of these 17 stories revolve around Lisa (who is often their narrator) and follow her from age six until she is 40. Each is self-contained, a snapshot meant to give a focused, frozen look into palpable--and unambiguous--emotions. In the title story, six-year-old Lisa is forced, during her mother's illness, to stay at her aunt Georgina's where she experiences the class antagonisms that erupt when a poor child enters a middle-class home and unwittingly violates unspoken codes of conduct. Later, in ""Lost and Found,"" Donoghue explore nine-year-old's Lisa's ambivalent relationship to religion, as she quips: ""She said that if we came down front and accepted Jesus as our personal savior our names would be written in his book forever and we would be saved. I wondered about erasers, that's the kind of person I was at that point."" While wry humor makes an occasional appearance in the book, the collection is generally dreary, tough going. A few moments stand out, particularly a story in which Lisa's gruff, hard-drinking father is a young soldier who writes awkward but loving letters to his sister during WWII. By middle age, Lisa manages a kind of surface resignation, undermined all too easily by the book's glib pessimism. As Lisa herself puts it: ""It's not fair to say that nothing changes--it does, but never for the better."" In the end, we mourn more than we sympathize for these characters who are ""[t]oo late to leave, too mired in the place, unable to dream of anywhere else."" (Aug.)