‘Fault’s’ divorce tales a tough slog Lack of story variety makes book humdrum

FAULT LINES: STORIES OF DIVORCE, collected and edited by Caitlin Shetterly, The Berkley Publishing Group, New York, 2001, 357 pages, $21.95.

When something really terrible happens, many of us turn to literature for comfort. This is what Caitlin Shetterly did when her parents got divorced, as she tells us in the introduction to this elegant if limited collection of stories by mostly well-known authors.

Each writer represented here approaches the subject from a slightly different angle and, of course, there are many ways to describe the unhappy disassembling of a family, but finally, the experience of reading this book is one of sad monotony.

Some of the stories are wonderful. John Updike’s “Separating” is typically exquisite, and “The Winter Father” by Andre Dubus is somber and powerful. There are beautifully written stories by John Cheever, Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Alice Elliot Dark, which manage to capture in carefully selected details the mood and content of the particular sorrow of divorce.

Other stories are not as successful. Several, such as “Hobbits and Hobgoblins” by Randall Kenan and “Small World” by Peter Ho Davies and the inevitable dreary offering by Ann Beattie, are moody and lifeless in that familiar modern way that passes for sophistication. Because you don’t feel you even want to know most of the characters in these stories, you may find their troubles depressing instead of touching.

Finally, the problem with this book is its lack of variety. Short story collections can be wonderful. When you put a lot of different authors together, each with their own individual style, every story can seem like a separate, surprising little jewel. However, when the theme and mood are the same, the effect can be wearying. Although individually many of the stories in “Fault Lines” are powerful and moving, taken together they are too similar in tone. The theme is the same again and again, and, as the reader slogs through story after story about unhappy families coming apart, the book becomes tedious.

The men are always unfaithful. Everybody drinks too much. The children are wounded. The aftermath is grim and unfulfilling. Nobody gets what they thought they wanted. One by one, these sad stories parade by.

Always, as I read these stories, I felt the shadowy presence of the editor, Caitlin Shetterly, who, in her gracefully written introduction, credits these tales with helping her come to terms with her “grief at the dissolution of her family” and calls the stories in this collection “among the best friends I’ve ever had.”

These stories struck me as approximations of Shetterly’s own experience. Though they have given her comfort and a vehicle to express herself and to her family her unhappiness about her parents’ divorce, she has missed an opportunity to create her own work by writing the story that is uniquely hers. She is obviously a sensitive and gifted writer, and it is clear that she has a message to deliver. I would like so much to hear her own story, told in her own words, when she feels ready. I have a feeling it could be an interesting and wonderful book.

Caitlin Shetterly, a Maine native and graduate of George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill, lives in New York City where she works as a writer and actress. Martha Tod Dudman, author of the recent memoir “Augusta, Gone” and a professional fund-raiser with Gary Friedmann & Associates, lives in Northeast Harbor.