People I Wanted to Be.

Huang, Lily

People I Wanted to Be by Gina Ochsner, Mariner, 2005, $12.00 paper, ISBN 0618563725.

One of the better stories in Gina Ochsner's second collection is about a pair of twin girls in a family of morticians. The girls grow up with the dead, which they keep in their basement, and become skilled, with the aid of makeup and a few more-potent chemicals, at making dead people look presentable. Their work--their upbringing--doesn't make them indifferent to death; in fact, it is they who harbor the most genuine respect for the dead. But when death visits the family itself everyone is caught, in a stunned moment, without preparation. Suddenly, business--the candle wax, the formaldehyde, the dressing up of a corpse--becomes personal.

Many of the stories in People I Wanted to Be deal with loss, or the fear of losing. In "Articles of Faith," a couple who has a succession of miscarriages shares their home with the ghosts of their three unborn children. In "When the Dark Is Light Enough," a man is estranged from his wife when she can't understand the nature of his work--performing autopsies. "A Darkness Held" suggests the kind of life one might lead after a loved one's traumatic death, a sense of what it might be like to survive someone. Are we even meant to survive? Imogene McCrary seems to ask. For "this she can't quite understand: why God would make life hurt if it were meant to last so long."

Ochsner's first book, The Necessary Grace to Fall, made a promising start down this path of unfulfillment. It unostentatiously established her particular perspective, a view of the world populated by people with quirky jobs who, because of what they do or where they are, confront the facts of life a little differently. The book won a number of prizes, including the Flannery O'Connor Award, but was somehow only printed once, by a university press.

Ochsner's second book, from a trade publisher, is much more readily available but, alas, not quite on the mark. Though all of these episodes of loss have intriguing premises, the stories themselves somehow fail to live up to the ideas that launch them, whether you think they are about the supernatural or, in fact, the perfectly ordinary. The visitations of ghosts, the departing of spirits, the extracting of still-beating hearts--all of these phenomena fall short of their promise because they are perhaps, in the end, too tame. They seem to occur not because they must, but simply because they can--because fiction is creative and because, as Ochsner's epigraph suggests, "everything not forbidden can and will happen."

No doubt this is true--in fiction of all places. But then the question becomes not what can happen but what should happen. What should happen is what would be essential to Ochsner's characters, what would change them or illuminate them--in other words, what would merit a story. The problem is that, at least in the manner in which things are told, neither the extraordinary events nor the ordinary suffering people seem to merit the telling. The events, perhaps owing to Ochsner's belief that everything not strictly off-limits is equally possible, come off as humdrum, and the people are distinctly tormented, undeniably uneasy, but vaguely incomplete.

One expects to come away from a book with a title like People I Wanted to Be with a strong sense of who these people are. But Ochsner doesn't wholly manage to convey her people, though she sometimes takes pains, as in the semi-successful "Last Words of the Mynah Bird," to speak in their voices. She seems to lack the sense of economy essential to the genre (though her stories are not long), and at the same time to lack an instinct for essentiality--for telling only and exactly what a story calls for. Nothing in a good short story is inessential, but many of the details of Ochsner's stories could easily fall away: the condensed history of the Czechs that inflates "Signs and Markings," the actions that pad the dialogue of "When the Dark Is Light Enough," which could as well happen as not. The stories are too full of offbeat names (Eislis Findlay, Lusya Valentina Artov) and impenetrable personages who, by the end, still require explanation.

The best explanations for what appears in a short story are tacit: the essential discomfort contained in a single thought, pleasure evoked in a gesture. But the work of explaining in Ochsner falls to the histories--of the Czechs, of Siberia--which have suggested to her a host of troubled people but which, as justifications for why a story ought to be told, seem forced. Ultimately, this is a failure of her prose. Too often it misses the note; instead of moving ever closer to the heart of the premise, every sentence cohering better and better to a materializing whole, some lines seem more native to the story than others. Some are extraneous, and some just don't sound quite right.

Still, the ideas are good, and Ochsner can make good moments out of them. There is the luminous fish caught at the end of "The Fractious South," originally published in The New Yorker, which embodies the narrator's central preoccupation: the life a returned soldier most wants to preserve, the only one worth fighting for. "I looked at the fallen fish and felt within me such a mixture of rage and sorrow and lunacy that I almost understood why men killed each other."

Ochsner hasn't wandered far from the path she found in The Necessary Grace to Fall. And it's right that, upon reaching a harmonious place with her first book, she shouldn't simply stay put. But the title story in that book is more complete than any in the second, with a much clearer sense of itself. It, too, is about a man who deals with deaths--someone who investigates insurance claims--and it has what the later stories distinctly lack: a sense of urgency, a necessity inherent in the telling. What's missing from the second collection is this subtle suspense. More than the originality of the premise, a story's success depends on how a premise is carried out--how it justifies itself and shows its outcome to be not only possible but, at some point in time, in some part of the world, certain.