At first glance Gravity, Erica Wagner’s first collection of stories, exhibits a somewhat dizzying variety of subject and setting — Ancient Egypt, Thailand, the East Anglian fens, New York’s Upper East Side, the Reading Room of the British Library. And though all are described with authority and grace it is with a kind of relief that the reader seizes on recurring motifs — men who have no smell, mothers and daughters who disappoint each other, women who fall from great heights.

Falling, as it happens, is a key to Gravity, most aptly named and only in part for the absence of levity. Miss Wagner’s stories are interesting not for their diversity, but for their common ground: loneliness, or rather aloneness, and its concomitant “inexorable gravitational pull” towards another. Here are characters who find themselves alone, whether through choice, or abandonment, or bereavement, for whom life is a fragmented affair, a series of connections desired and feared, made and broken — territory, of course, which lends itself to the short story. The analogy between falling earthwards and falling into the embrace of another is made explicit in the title story, which is also one of the finest. ‘Gravity’ is a clever conceit on the laws of physics and desire, in which the solitary existence of an astronomer — who believes, erroneously, that ‘we are separated by distance and motion. All of us. All of us swing like planets, or comets, or stars, each on our own cosmic path’ — is disturbed by the arrival of a fellow astronomer, a young woman. Tragedy results.

This potential for destruction helps explain why Wagner’s characters so often seek to preserve autonomy, of which the holding of secrets is but a part. In ‘Please Don’t’, the oneness of a young woman researcher in the British Library seems impregnable, until mysterious notes begin to appear on her desk – “Please don’t sigh” etc. In ‘The Great Leonardo’ a priest abandons his vocation and turns to lion-taming, to “dancing with soft-furred death”, because of a woman who came to his church and gave “a shape to his fear”. At times connection is simply seen as a matter of a voice on a telephone, or a fleeting, but transforming touch. In ‘How Many There Are, How Fast They Go’ a woman viewing the body of her young husband, who has been killed in a car accident, is prevented from falling by the strong arm of a morgue attendant, leaving them “dancing, almost laughing, spinning on the low-lit floor to a faint canned tune in the distance”.

Occasionally Wagner’s stories seem to buckle beneath their own weight, much as the astronomer of ‘Gravity’ finds himself “collapsed inwards, contracted by a force invisible and all-pervasive”. Such is the case with “The Bends”, a slight tale about a woman who falls for an unsuitable thatcher before returning to her suitable PhD student boyfriend. And she betrays some of the anxiety of the first-time author to prove her versatility, her seriousness of intent. But the best of these stories are beautifully imagined and controlled — the chilly elegance of ‘Pyramid’, for example, where a Pharaoh’s daughter sacrifices herself to the construction of her father’s tomb, or ‘Mysteries of the Ancients’. Here a rare note of exuberance is sounded and another kind of monument appears, one affirming life rather than death, when a man consoles himself for the defection of his wife with a joyous, crazy project, a modern Stonehenge, built of used cars, in an empty lot. There is plenty here to make Wagner’s novel worth waiting for.

The quality of Erica Wagner’s prose in her first collection of short stories is immediately obvious in the title piece, although the tone here is untypical of those that follow. The story makes a powerful opening statement about the themes that concern her. Its narrator, a forty-year-old American astronomer called Davenport, has withdrawn to a mountain-top observatory. In language that is measured and often redolent of the magical aspects of his discipline, he grows increasingly disturbing. He describes his sadistic and ultimately fatal sexual relationship with a visiting scientist, Dr Victoria Greenwood. Both characters are dissociated from normal responses as a result of their professional obsessiveness.

‘Stealing’ is set in Wagner’s native city of New York and is more indicative of the scale to which she works. It is the first of several poignant character studies exploring a range of domestic personal crises. Jeannie is a likeable, humorous woman trying to understand an episode in her childhood relationship with her mother. She tells us that her pilfering began as a reaction against her parents’ liberal attitude towards her. It became acute, she suspects, only when she realised that her mother thought of her as fat. He decision to take twenty-dollar bills in order to buy large quantities of food was perhaps a dislocated rebellion against the diet that her mother had put her on. “Because I was eleven, I couldn’t begin to hate her. I could only keep stealing.” Wagner develops the contradictions in Jeannie’s behaviour — her wish to be seen as compliant while also needing to defy — and the ambiguities inherent in the very act of remembering.

In this and other similarly successful stories — such as a woman’s ambivalent feelings towards her mother-in-law, and ‘Haircut’, in which a redundant Brooklyn-born executive pretends to his wife that he is still going out to work — much of the substance is in the realistic, and fascinating, backgrounds that are created for them. In ‘A Few Hours at Home’, it is the way Wagner is seemingly able to create suspense out of thin air that is astonishing. A schoolteacher who is on a camping trip in Wales telephones his wife: this is the first time they have been apart; she previously drifted from one unsatisfactory boyfriend to another before finding in him the security she craves; he is not the sort who would tolerate an affair. Later, her promiscuous past insinuates itself into her mind and the tension in this simple situation is stretched to breaking point. Her old address book, we are told, “hummed in her lap. She didn’t want anything to be different… But she saw that her happiness was a terrible, fragile thing, a blown glass globe with her inside.”

There are some stories which are less successful. ‘Please Don’t ’ is about a researcher working in the Round Reading Room at the British Library, whose life of quiet self-absorption is disrupted by a series of mysterious notes left on her desk. Although a witty and entertaining piece, the imbalance between the compelling plot and the relatively thin characterisation could leave us thinking: so what? Whether ‘Pyramid’ is clear enough in its own right, without reference to the Herodotus tale from which it is taken, is open to question.

Nevertheless, these quibbles are minor ones. Wagner’s great gift proves to be her ability to transform bleak situations through the careful geometry of her prose, which resonates with the redeeming mysteries of life.

“I am thinking,” my father says, his hands set like a little teepee under his chin, “that it would be nice to build one of those in America.”
“One of what, Dad?” my brother asks. John is twelve. He doesn’t have problems with questions like that. We are sitting in the living room, the three boys, Mom used to say, watching the TV with the lights off. Now that my mother’s gone, Dad doesn’t bother to tell us it’s bad for your eyes to do that. The TV is a big blue eye in the centre of the room, and we are shadows in the flickering corners.
“Like Stonehenge,” and he nods towards the TV. We are watching a show that’s on every week, Mysteries of the Ancients, and this week it’s all about big stone things that no one seems to know much about.
“What?” my brother says. He rolls his eyes at me: I can see the whites turn in the light from the TV, like cats’ eyes in the dark. Dad is not looking at either of us, but staring at the TV. He’s turned the sound down so it’s only pictures, pictures of stones.
“You couldn’t use stones,” he says, more to himself than to us. “Stones are kind of bulky and anyway, there aren’t any around here.” He stops, taps his fingers together, and then looks s at me, smiling. “And stones aren’t very American, are they?” Does he want me to answer? But then he goes on. “I’m sure,” he says, “that there are other things you could use. All you’d have to do is give it a little careful thought.”
He turns back to the TV, puts the sound up again. Now they’re showing some place in Ireland, some big ugly tomb. The camera makes circles around it, and they play weird Irish music. My father points to the set.
“I’ve read about that one,” he says. “There’s a door to it, with a slit in it or something, and on just one day a year, at just one time, the sun comes in and makes this bright light all inside the tomb.”
John, who has been asking to watch some sitcom, shrugs. “So?”
Dad turns to him, really slowly, as if while he’s moving he’s thinking of important things, as if the way he’s moving is making him think of important things.
“That’s a good question, son.” I can’t remember him ever calling either of us son. It’s like something out of a book. “That’s a good question. I wonder that too. What’s the big deal? But I’m looking at those pictures and I’m thinking that it is a big deal. It isn’t about money. Anybody can have money. What it’s about it energy.” He says that last word slowly, en-er-gy, and stops just before he says it, like he didn’t know what it was going to be until the second it actually came out of his mouth. “Energy. That’s the important thing.” He curls his hands into fists and presses the knuckles together. “That’s what we need.”
He’s staring at the TV and I can see he’s thinking hard. Since Mom left he things all the time. Mostly it doesn’t bother me. Dad is a man who can do anything, in his way; not that he’s ever done anything important in his life, not in the way anybody looking from the outside would see it. But when he says that word, energy, there is something new in his voice. My father’s a practical man, he flicks past Oral Roberts on Sunday mornings and says, “You’d think Darwin would’ve taught them a lesson.” But he says that word like it is religion, like whatever it is, he’s going to get us some.

* * *

My mother left us six months ago. I can’t take this anymore, she said, I just can’t take this. She was standing in the kitchen when she said it. I was sitting at the table at the time, trying to do my homework, and I looked up at her straight, thin back silhouetted against the window. Her hair was in a thick braid down her back, with little hairs standing out from it, wild, escaping the braid and the rubber band down by her waist. She turned towards me, and looked at me hard, as if I was someone she’d never seen before.
“I was your age when Matthew was born,” she said. Matthew is my brother that died when he was two. My older brother. I think he is still my older brother, even though we were never in the world at the same time. “I was just like you, just the same.” I didn’t really know what she meant. Her hands were on her hips, leaving wet marks on her pants. She sighed, and dropped her shoulders down like she was tired. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I’m sorry.” And she kissed me on the forehead and walked out of the room.
I went on doing my homework. I’d heard her say funny things before; my Dad said that’s why he loved her, she was so unexpected about everything. I thought maybe she’d had a hard day at the plant where she worked, that she’d go out back and have a cigarette, come back and finish making supper. But she didn’t.
At seven o’clock my Dad came into the kitchen. “Hi, Champ,” he said to me, and put his hand on my head. “Where’s your mother?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought she was out back. She seemed kind of fed up. She hasn’t come back in here.”
She wasn’t anywhere. She’d packed a suitcase and gone. That was it. Like she said, I guess she couldn’t take it anymore; maybe it was just us. After that, my father never really talked about her at all. It was like she was dead.

* * *

He takes out a little ad in the back of the Phoenix Gazette:

WANTED!
USED CARS
ANY MAKE OR MODEL
WILL PAY CASH!

And he puts our phone number at the bottom.
The ad went in on a Sunday, in the late edition, and on Monday morning I’m all set to walk out the door with John when Dad stops me.
“Hey, Champ,” he says. “No school for you today. Come on back in.”
John and I stare at Dad. John’s mouth is hanging open so wide I can see his fillings, but mine is not. I have a feeling I know what is coming. John says “Da-a-ad…” the way he used to when he was little.
Dad glares at him. “You just stop that. Someone’s got to stay here and answer the phone. I’ll bet it rings off the hook.”
“Why not me?” John throws his bag on the floor like nothing could make him pick it up again.
“Because I say. Because Greg is older. God knows what you’d say to those people. Now pick that up and get out of the house.”
John mooches, kicks at his bag, twists his hands. Dad sighs. “It’s no use,” he says. “You’re going to school. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.” John brightens, picks up his bag, and my Dad puts his arm around his shoulder. “I’d better stop off at the school anyhow,” he says, “and tell them how sick you are. Scarlet fever, right?” He winks at me. I’m still not sure what’s going on.
“Scarlet fever, Dad,” I say.
When they’ve gone I sit down by the phone. I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s not like I haven’t bummed off school before, but this is different. I try to think of what I’d do if I was just bumming off, no strings attached, and I think I’d probably walk out toward the sandy lots at the end of town – but then, I wouldn’t be going there alone, there’d be a bunch of us and we’d do something. And anyway, I can’t leave the house, I have to stay by the phone. I start tot think, but what if one of my teachers calls? What if Mr Olsen decides he’s got a used car to sell in his coffee break, and calls here? Should I answer the phone like I’m sick? Should I pretend to be someone else? This is what I’m trying to decide when the phone rings.
“Hello,” I say. It comes out squeaky, like sick and not-me both at the same time. It isn’t a good effect.
“…Hello? Is this 555-6759? Used cars?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yeah, that’s us.”
“I got a Pontiac ’75. Want to get rid of it. Any offers?”
I have no idea. Dad said cash. I wonder what cash he meant.
“Look,” I say. “It’s not me that wants the car. It’s my dad. Steve Snow. Can he call you when he gets home from work? That’s about six o’clock.”
The man at the other end of the phone breathes out heavily, hissing loudly in my ear. “Yeah, I guess so,” he says. “Your old man, huh? Opening a business?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, good luck to him, I say,” and the man laughs, not very nicely. But I take his number, writing it down, along with ‘Pontiac – 1975’ at the top of a piece of looseleaf I pulled from my school notebook. I take his name, too, Carl Felix. By the end of the day I have a whole long list of numbers, cars, years and names, which I hand to Dad when he gets home. He grins like he’s really happy.
“Terrific, kiddo,” he says. “A good day’s work. How about that.” And he keeps on grinning, looking down at the sheet of paper. John comes in and peers around him to see what I’ve written, then stares at me. I shrug. Dad folds the paper carefully and slips it in the back pocket of his jeans. “Come on, buddies,” he says. “Let’s go out for pizza.”
“Pizza!” John gallops upstairs, thump thump thump, to get his jacket. He’d do anything for pizza, and it’s the only thing guaranteed to cheer him up when the Firebirds lose a game or some other tragedy blights his life. We ate a lot of pizza right after Mom left, and for the first couple of months even that barely did it for him. But now pizza is back to being just a great thing for John, and when my Dad takes us out, all three of us squeezed into the cab of the truck, it feels like a real boys’ outing.
The funny thing is, these are the times I miss Mom most. Or not miss, exactly – I just wonder where she is and what she’s doing, right at that very moment. We haven’t heard anything from her, she could be in Alaska for all we know. So when Dad says we’re going for pizza, I say it’s great, and he gives me the keys so I can start up the truck, and then I hear John come running down the stairs, and the screen door slam. I’m glad that we fit so tight in the truck, because I feel pretty lonely and far away.

Illuminating the loneliness of the human condition, the difficulty of making connections with others, and the fragility of those connections once made, these fresh and compelling pieces are the work of a true storyteller. Erica Wagner reaches into the fractured lives of her characters and finds moments of redemption, despair and exhilaration.