Charlie Boy.

Schoolfield, George C.

The less-than-novel-length narratives of Johan Bargum have been admirable from his beginnings with the brief tales of Svartvitt (1965). After a stretch of novel production, he returned to the short-story genre with Husdjur (1986), and he showed what he could do with the novella in Resor (1988); to date Charlie Boy is his masterpiece in compressed prose, a compression for which his gifts are perfectly suited: laconicism, implication, the unspoken invitation to the reader to participate. The nine stories must not be read swiftly; doing so reduces them to entertainment literature - the mistake a broad American public used to make with the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. (One wonders, by the way, if these authors have been among Bargum's sometime models; without exception, his novels bear traces, plain or hidden, of the detective tradition.) The tales of Charlie Boy too center on mysteries; however, only one, "The Spy," in which a cuckolded father persuades his son, the eponymous Charlie Boy, to act as gumshoe, has an obvious sleuthing reference.

All the stories depict young people, often confronted by parental or quasi-parental figures (an emotional web where Bargum's contributions have been notable), and almost all - again typically Bargumian - have a strong sense of place. "The Man from Manhattan" evokes the Big Apple's excitement and vague (or sometimes not so vague) ominousness, from which - to our vast surprise - the innocent Nordic travelers emerge quite intact. "Brothers" goes back to Helsinki of the 1950s and has a plot smacking of television situation comedy: two pranksters try to match-make for their single parents and are foiled - apparently a droll story, but one filled with anxieties. "A Little Manure, a Little Care" (a gardening slogan that rhymes in the original) leads from honeymoon months to a horrifying end, at least for animal lovers. (In Husdjur Bargum proved that he knew a great deal about pets.)

"Prince Valiant," perhaps the best of the lot here, dwells on the medieval chevelure of a shy adolescent, enamored of a female barber; the zoo excursion the boy protagonist takes with the other woman in his life, his little sister (again the dynamics of a single-parent home), is heartrending. "JP" is a late-twentieth-century facetia: regular adulterous encounters are spoiled when "JP's" trusting and infertile best friend - the husband of his longtime lover - suggests that his wife be impregnated with "JP's" sperm by artificial insemination. "The Spy" - a letter from a father, imprisoned for financial shenanigans, to his estranged daughter - offers an account of youthful detective work as an excuse for later ethical flaws. The concluding "Sun Path" has a father-and-daughter pair once more: he drives her to the Helsinki depot for her first trip on her own; the adjective heartrending, used above, should not be overworked, however great the temptation. An early-morning epilogue - the thoughts of the father, alone in his car with a forgotten mitten - somehow suggests another Bargum story about a father, a daughter, and the transitoriness of life: "The Architect" in Resor.

A review in the Helsinki paper Hufvudstadsbladet states that Bargum is in "a world class" as a prose narrator. Unhappily, anglophones have still not had the chance to know him well, save for pieces in such anthologies and periodicals as Swedo-Finnish Short Stories (1974), Books from Finland (1982 ff.), A Way to Measure Time (1992), and Dimension (1994).

George C. Schoolfield Yale University