Far-flung

When Peter Cameron's collection One Way or Another was published in 1986 it heralded a distinctive new voice in American fiction - "one of the best writers about middle-class youth since Salinger" (Booklist). One Way or Another brought genuine emotional breadth to the predicaments of a generation that was coming of age uneasily, in a world in which families and relationships had lost their moorings. In his new group of stories, Far-flung, Cameron draws a gallery of. Diverse characters who find themselves at an impasse that is often as much emotional as it is the result of forces outside them. The uncertainties of their youth have developed into something more serious, and more tragic, for promises that have been held out to them all their lives - the comforts of love and the satisfaction of success - have proved to be elusive, equivocal, or, at worst, hollow. We meet a woman whose casualapparently dispassionate - affair with a. Younger man awakens a dormant loneliness; a man whose painful inability to conceive a child with his wife leads him into an increasingly cumbersome and compromising fantasy; a woman numbed by the loss of one son, struggling to sustain closeness with her surviving child. Couples - both straight and gay - reach a stage in their being together where indifference comes to provide its own kind of comfort. While the protagonists of One Way or Another dreamed of contentment as. An ideal kind of weightlessness, the people who inhabit Far-flung are anchored to the earth - be it a cornfield in Indiana or an African veldt - by a gravity they are just beginning to understand. With their freshness, wit, and crystalline perception, these beautifully written, quietly piercing stories are the exciting fulfillment of the promise of a remarkable writer.