Pieces for the Left Hand

Lennon muses in brief, deadpan vignettes on mortality and progress in a small New York university town. Grouped under seven rubrics that range from the prosaic (“Town and Country,” “Parents,” “Children”) to the existential (“Mystery and Confusion,” “Doom and Madness”), these segments catch the unnamed narrator, a 47-year-old married man living with his professor wife in a renovated farmhouse and with ample time to walk, in moments of self-reflection and thoughtful observation on happenings such as a disused road’s disappearance from a map, or how an under-construction water pipeline becomes a lethal joyride conduit for students. Or he wonders how his cat has obtained another cat’s collar; why he sometimes feels like an intruder in his own home; and how dreams and memory often play tricks on him. One segment aims at exposing the sadness of an acquaintance who struck it rich, but it can’t quite prove that money doesn’t buy happiness; riffs about artists and professors poke fun at the charlatans and theorists of the trades. Occasionally withering and frequently hilarious, these anecdotes highlight little knots of human curiosity. (Apr.)