In My Other Life: Stories
The inhabitants ofIn My Other Life--bartenders and waitresses, drug counselors, teachers, many with histories of narcotics use or minor criminality--come to engaging life in Joan Silber's serene, understated prose. She renders even the few fantastic occurrences in her first short-story  collection in simple, serviceable phrases, like aluminum cutlery--not the stuff you'd bring out for company, but the battered, durable everyday kind.   That Silber can sometimes make a kite or a suspension bridge out of knives and  forks is one reason for reading these stories, which in other ways may sound  like oldNew Yorkerfiction: short on incident, long on tranquil  recollection. In "Without Ellie," a young woman remembers the night that she  failed to save the life of her mentally disturbed stepsister, who broke away  from her on a Manhattan street one night and was later found beaten and stabbed. In "Partners," a Florida travel agent receives a phone call in the wake of Hurricane Andrew from her old friend and business partner, for many years a drug runner and shady character. Rae tells Nathan about her sojourn in the basement during the hurricane, and, from the safety of middle age, recalls the "tremendous things" they had undergone in their youths: a failed drug buy in  La Paz, the new gun that made Nathan "silky and confident."In fact, they had worn her out, those exciting troubles.  She was weather-beaten when they were over. But down in the laundry cellar, with the pipes shaking, she was just as glad to be weather-beaten. All the disasters of her life (and Nathan was far from the worst) seemed reassuring, the grislier the better, she was glad to have them to remember. The trouble stored in her was like a white noise, another roar, to whatever was outside.At their most oblique, Silber's stories can read like the rambling monologues of transients in bus terminals--the book's opener, "Bobby Jackson," has a climax so soft that it's easy to miss--but at their best, they are shrewd and revelatory, well worth reading twice.--Regina Marler