Several Deceptions (four novellas)

By Jane Stevenson
Mariner, 272 p., $13

This collection of four novellas from British writer Jane Stevenson is a spectacular debut. Mariner has put its first paragraph on the book’s cover — a wise decision, because of the freshness of Stevenson’s voice, and not a misleading one, since she sustains the narrative energy throughout.

I should say voices, for each piece has a distinct one. Each piece has and is its own world; each is shot through, as the reviewing cliché goes, with intelligence, humor and odd profundity. Stevenson’s characters are intelligent, snobby and often they are mean and petty — people not quite comfortable in the world they were born in or in the one they’ve made. There’s cleverness, on the writer’s and the characters’ parts, but it’s not there for its own sake.

In The Island of The Day Before Yesterday, a practical joke goes wonderfully awry, and we delight in seeing the narrator, its perpetrator, more clearly than he sees himself. In Law and Order, aristocratic Dutch twins arrive at law school, where a sinister aristocratic professor teaches and picks his favorites. In The Colonel and Judy O’Grady, we learn something of the latter, a nun in an exiled Tibetan monastery in India and archiver at the University of Edinburgh, and the former, whom she knew in India in the early ’60s. But that’s not really the point of the story; the narrator, writing her thesis on Tacitus, is the subject (sort of). College friends in their thirties meet for a country-house visit in Crossing the Water and their friendly circle is destroyed.

Stevenson has a novel, London Bridges, coming out from Houghton Mifflin in 2001, and I’m looking forward to seeing how she handles the novel form, since these novellas are so deft and suited to their form. Neither long stories nor truncated novels, they’re meaty and yet still evocative. We are left challenged, satisfied and haunted. What higher praise is there for fiction?

—Rachel Carpenter