An arresting collection Yarmouth native spotlights the pain of Maine’s young and restless

These are the differences I see between city women and women from Maine: city women eat vegetables, they can’t drive in snow and they’re used to witnessing human indecencies of the public kind rather than the more horrifying private kind. – from “Finches”

Lewis Robinson feels the pulse of Maine’s conflicted heart. With unerring lucidity, his fiction captures the uneasy truce between its natives and summer people, the haves and the have-nots, those restless for more and those longing for less.

The 31-year-old Portland writer fills his first book, a collection of short stories, with young men on the verge of something they can’t quite get into focus. For one it is love, for another adventure, yet for most it is just something – anything – that will break up the monotony of their lives.

“Officer Friendly and Other Stories” is a collection of 11 short stories, all set in the fictional town of Port Allison, Maine. It has been reviewed favorably by The New York Times, Newsday, Esquire and Newsweek.

Robinson was interviewed in December on National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” as one of three up-and-coming young American writers. Like many of the characters in his stories, the Portland writer knows he’s on the verge of something. In Robinson’s case, it’s literary success.

The 31-year-old writer grew up in Yarmouth, where his father was headmaster at North Yarmouth Academy, and worked summers on the Monhegan ferry and at the general store in Port Clyde. To see clearly the place he portrays so plainly in these stories, however, Robinson had to leave.

“It was good to have 1,000 miles between me and Maine,” he said in a recent phone interview. “Details come more clearly from a distance. Being nostalgic about home, I remembered things more clearly.”

Robinson did much of the work on the stories that make up the book while attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop between 1999 and 2002. He waited to enter graduate school after he’d earned his bachelor’s degree in English at Middlebury College in 1994. He worked two years as a truck driver moving artwork for galleries, but his first job out of college was working as writer John Irving’s personal assistant.

The author of “The World According to Garp” and “Cider House Rules” still writes exclusively on an electric typewriter. Robinson worked with all of Irving’s first draft material, putting it into a computer and proofreading it. The young writer said that from Irving he learned diligence.

” … I did learn from him that rewriting is everything. I watched as he went from the 11th draft to the 12th draft and was still making improvements on the prose,” Robinson told NPR. “That was the inspiring thing. I think that his favorite part of writing was rewriting, and he just had a tireless work ethic.”

That example served the Portland writer well when he found an interested editor in New York. Robinson said he had nine of the 11 stories written but felt that only four were ready for publication. It took him a year to rework them and write two new stories to complete the book.

“What ties them together besides place are the tensions between the local and vacationers. Also connected to that are class subtleties and the subtleties between the classes, although it’s not necessarily an aspect in all the stories. I think overall that the mood of the collection as a whole is tied to place. Place is the glue.”

Relationships between young men and adolescent boys are at the center of the best of his stories. The title piece and “Puckheads,” the longest in the collection, both portray the stylized verbal and literal fisticuffs that forge the friendships of teenage males. In “Puckheads,” a tale of two hockey players forced into the drama club, Robinson describes a melee on the ice: “Most of the players were paired off, with their fists raised, circling each other like magnets.”

“The guys in these stories” said Robinson, “their friendships are very interesting in a lot of ways, but not in the ‘New Age-sensitive-guy’ kind of way. I understand how they relate to one another and show their allegiance to one another. Teenage friendship has always fascinated me. A lot of my friendships in high school were kind of tricky, too.”

He’s not anxious to stray from the themes in these stories. The novel the writer recently began is set in Maine and written from the point of view of a teenager – a middle child who defines himself by stealing.

Robinson works on it each morning, even though “writing’s still is super hard for me. It’s exhausting and very isolating. When I think about the fact that I’m 31 with all these ambitions to write all these books, it seems so daunting.”

The result, however, is worth every bit of effort he pours into each draft and rewrite. Unlike the characters in “Puckheads” waiting for something, anything, to happen in small-town Maine, the intense light of the literary world is shining upon Robinson, the same way he illuminates the inhabitants of Port Allison.

“Officer Friendly and Other Stories,” by Lewis Robinson, is published by HarperCollins and costs $23.95.