WAYFARING AT WAVERLY IN SILVER LAKE: Stories

McCourt's latest collection, though funny and smart enough for two books, falls short of gratification. It revisits the life of Kaye Wayfaring, an aging movie star (and recurring character in McCourt's work) who lives in Los Angeles's tony Silver Lake neighborhood. Wayfaring's true career is a thing of the past, but she still appears in music videos and popular movies. These seven tales all chronicle some form of inner epiphany, each one bound up with one of the seven deadly sins. The stories are largely composed of highly poeticized dialogue, in which characters speak in cutting witticisms about movie stars, religious movements, philosophy, politics and an all-you-can-eat buffet of other subjects. McCourt's perpetual speculation is intellectually engaging, but the book lacks the force of his earlier work—the stories' inner discoveries are not monumental enough to fully take hold. In the title story, focusing on Pride, Wayfaring watches a house next door slowly being torn down as she reflects on how a lost nomination for an Oscar dealt a blow to her career. "In Tir na nOg (Covetousness)" reveals Wayfaring gorging on chocolates, trying to forget that she will never be as charming as "Norma Jean." In "Enseñada (Anger)," Wayfaring goes to a costume party dressed as an Irish war goddess with three heads—and then tears a Marilyn Monroe mask off another partygoer and tosses it into a fireplace. The explosions that occur in this collection are Chekhovian in their subtlety, masked in a layer of craft so thick that it is often hard to see what lies beneath. (July 9)

Forecast:Sales may rise if booksellers display this collection alongside McCourt's first novel, Mawrdew Czgowchwz (reissued earlier this year by the New York Review of Books Classics).