This is the second notable novel that has appeared within the last six months about a white slave catcher and an escaped slave woman. The first was Soul Catcher by Michael White, which I wrote about in my October blog on American Journeys. Each of these sagas has its unique contribution to understanding the time and the people of this era of history. While the first focused on an educated and reflective slave catcher caught in "the trade" by his own weaknesses, the second focuses on the woman and her visionary ability to see what she believes is the future of her people. The first looks at the awkward community formed by the slaves and the slave catchers as they journey back to the South. The second examines the community that free blacks and slaves create under the nose of the whites and the "code" that enables them to openly pass secret messages about runaways in public.

James McBride first won adulation for his portrayal of his childhood and of his widowed mother's determination to raise and properly educate her family. He established a reputation as an engrossing story-teller with the vignettes he pulled from his own experiences and the memories he wrangled from his mother, who was reluctant to reveal her past as the child of Jewish immigrants who ran away to marry a black Baptist preacher. The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother is an unusual but nonetheless quintessentially American tale in which the author searches to understand his heritage and family origins.

His current book, Song Yet Sung, is fictional but is no less rooted in American culture, and no less an exploration of American origins. At one point, it imagines that the predecessors of Martin Luther King, Jr. might have been such people as are characters in this story, and by extension that this is a story that belongs to all of us who yearn for freedom for want, worry, and concern, and dream of a sense of purpose, inner peace and security, the ability to achieve our dreams.

The story has a local flavor as it takes place on the eastern shore of Southern Maryland - a spit of land between the Chesapeake and the Atlantic Ocean, where watermen earn a hard living scraping oysters off the sea floor. It portrays the unusually interdependent relations among slaves, free blacks, poor watermen, slave catchers (and the hardened and deceitful slave stealers), and wealthy landowners. There are many character threads to follow: a wild man living in the marshes, a young man secretly planning his break for freedom, a white woman and her slave who both were widowed in the same fishing accident, a cruel and lawless band who will lock up any black person free or slave and sell them down South.

The principal character is a woman named Liz; she is running for freedom and has the distinction of being "two-headed" - she has dreams that reveal the future. This future seen in visions and the characters she meets in her present suggest that even legally free people enslave themselves to other forms of bondage, and freedom will be a longer time coming than a simple flight to the North. Before she ever meets Denwood, the slave catcher who pursues her, other slaves tell him of her visions and interpretations of reality, and the messages begin to make sense to him. He has also suffered in his life, working hard with little reward, feeling loss of love, despair, and loneliness.

"He realized with a bit of shock...that their lives were exact mirrors of his, filled with silent, roaring, desperate, human fury and humiliation. He realized at that moment that he despised them even as he admired them. How could you like someone and hate them at the same time?" But he discovers that they seem to know more about the way the world operates than any of the white people who have been his companions. Like Cain in Michael White's Soul Catcher, he admires them and understands them, and yet needs them to accomplish his goals.

"He disliked making deals with slaves and free blacks. It hampered him in too many ways, mostly internally, because in making deals with them, they became more human to him, and in doing so - try as he might to resist the feeling - they became less slave and more man to him. he could not make a deal with a pig, or a dog, or a piece of pork. But if a man says to another man or woman, I'll give you this for that, then who are you dealing with? An equal? Or chattel? But he had no choice. She was enemy or friend."

As Liz's visions become clearer and Denwood's circular pursuit of her continues, Mr. McBride weaves in more of the straightforward religious conviction that keeps hopes up, and which he revealed in The Color of Water as so instrumental in his own upbringing. A free black man working for the Gospel Train, as they call the Underground Railroad, describes his perspective to the Dreamer, Liz,

-No need to fret about what's done, Clarence said matter-of-factly.
It's God's world. He washes you clean. He makes you whole. He puts
rain in your garden and sunshine in your heart. Just pray when you get
free, child. Pray for what you've done and what you gonna do. Lotta
folks around here believe in you. I don't, but lots do. You got some
kind of purpose, they say. It's got to be.
-But I don't know who I am.
-Well, there it is, he said ruefully. That's a problem, ain't it. If
you don't know who you are child. I'll tell you: you's a child of God.
-With all I seen, I don't know that I believe in God anymore, she said.
- Don't matter, the old man said. He believes in you.

Another epic tale that gives insight into our American story. Click to reserve your copy of Song Yet Sung (Riverhead, 1594489726, $25.95) now.

I know many readers prefer a novel because it allows them to enter into an author's world and vision more deeply and experience the story for a longer time. It may seem that a short story just gets started when it's over, and the reader must begin again with other characters. And generally, I share this desire for what one might describe as a completely realized experience, and understand the perception that a short story may be simply a warm-up exercise for the story-teller to try out a possible subject for a novel. However, with the guidance of Jhumpa Lahiri, I have discovered a different perspective.
Ms. Lahiri likely needs no introduction. Her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the year it was published, a rare honor. And she followed this with a beautifully sensitive and nuanced novel, The Namesake,... which last year was interpreted into a similarly accomplished film by renowned director Mira Nair, bringing still more attention to Ms. Lahiri's writing. Now on April 1st, her long-awaited second collection of short stories has arrived - Unaccustomed Earth.

My own bias now is quite frankly to favor her stories. Her writing style - so accessible, so descriptive and detailed - is particularly well-adapted to the distillation of mood and characters into a short, memorable moment that this medium entails. A story allows a writer to focus on - and a reader to remember - clear details that linger long after you have set down the book. As when visiting a museum, and lingering over a particularly well-realized painting, it is possible to appreciate elegantly chosen strokes and simplicity of expression, there is a similar effect to her writing, and so I was and am particularly excited to review her new collection.

There are clear differences between her first book, and this one. In Interpreter of Maladies, her characters explored their ability to integrate more or less successfully into a society that had expectations of them, and to come to terms with the expectations and contradictions they discovered in themselves. The mood was youthful and vital, slightly irreverent. In contrast, it seems that the central characters in the new collection have matured - in both concerns and personal choices. They are more weighted down by the expectations that the younger set may have tossed away more frivolously.

Initially, I missed the earlier style and resisted her more recent subject matter. She is about my age and has a personal background educationally and socially similar to me and my friends and peers. In her personal life, she has married, is raising children of her own, and now creeping irresistibly into her writing, we see the middle-aged subjects of family responsibility to both aging parents and young children and the accompanying expectations. Isn't this ground that has been covered before?

As I continued reading, it became clear that in spite of these ordinary circumstances, she retains the richness I previously associated with her writing. The characters themselves are aware of the choices they have made and of the youthfulness and impetuousness that are no longer as much a part of their lives. As they think about their past selves and reflect on where they currently are, complex palettes of emotions are revealed - loss, longing, the pressure of social obligations, and a counter-balancing determination to make the most of where they are now. Once in awhile, they are able to rest in a fleeting effortlessness of being and self-acceptance. It is this slowly developing awareness in each of them and of the reader in understanding them that makes each story and the collection as a whole so worthwhile.

I'm going to conclude by stating the obvious, that while Ms. Lahiri and many of her characters have a heritage that may be different from yours, the experiences she describes are shared by all humans maturing into the webs of responsibilities of family, friends, and intimate relationships. Once again her writing is a gift.

Unaccustomed Earth (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House, 0307265730, $25.00) is a Buyer's Choice selection so by buying from Olsson's you will save 20% on the cover price.

- Andrew