ACTS OF LOVE ON INDIGO ROAD

Terse, edgy and explosive, this collection—featuring 25 new stories as well as material from four earlier collections—proves conclusively that Agee still has her literary fastball. Indeed, the stylistic continuity is noteworthy: Agee's flair for stunning conceits and turn-on-a-dime plotting dominates throughout, and her feel for the gritty underbelly of blue-collar American life belies an equally impressive talent for poetic, elegiac writing. In general, the new stories are shorter than the earlier ones, but they pack a wallop nonetheless. "Indigo Road" is an anguished account of a mentally disturbed woman's decision to kill her children, while "The God of Gestures" finds a woman veering back and forth between her soon-to-be ex-husband—whom she dubs "the crying man"—and her new man, who appeared on an episode of America's Most Wanted. Stock car racing is the focus of several older stories. In "Losing Downforce," a failing Winston Cup driver tries to deal with having a woman crew chief; in "Omaha," a mechanic contemplates the cockiness of a younger driver. Agee is also a master of the short-short genre, something she proves with grace and eloquence in "What It Means," a brilliantly imagined ode to the power of the dead. There is some redundancy of themes and characters over the course of the collection, and occasionally the plot twists are merely busy rather than compelling. Yet each story contains gems of hard-edged humor ("When his IQ reaches 30, he should sell"), rich atmospheric detail and crisp observation, bolstering Agee's reputation as an unsentimental chronicler of desperate people trying to find happiness with the odds stacked against them. Author tour. (Apr.)