Haslett, Adam. You Are Not a Stranger Here. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2002. 240 pp.

After birth and death, the next great equalizer, according to new writing wunderkind Adam Haslett, is secret grief. Haslett’s protagonists in his first collection of short stories, You Are Not a Stranger Here, are so dogged and yet glorified by grief that the reader begins to feel left out of the club.

Haslett’s book, heralded by Jonathan Franzen as part of NBC’s Today program reading list, is a patchwork of nine stories based on the postmodern democracy of angst, where no explanation is needed, no criticism warranted. The writer’s victory is that no matter how he reveals himself through character choice, scenes, and psychiatry, we can marvel at the craft.

Yet, all my guesses turned out to be true: that Haslett must have spent significant time in England; that he is gay; and that he has an insider’s view of the multi-leveled world of mental illness. What must have excited Franzen is Haslett’s narrative breadth; he is as comfortable developing the bi-polar sexual tension between two teenage boys as he is visiting the hazy world of managed care. Haslett mixes realistic voices with achingly specific scene description, delivered with the painstaking care of someone trying to describe a natural disaster during a long-distance telephone call.

But the most important skill Haslett possesses is the ability to get inside his characters so that their points-of-view appear more logical and less convoluted, even as they struggle to understand their own existence. At the same time, Haslett has worked hard to avoid romanticizing about or proselytizing for the people he has focused on. In a true postmodern vein, Haslett has intentionally crafted ambiguous conclusions meant to allow the reader an extended ownership and, possibly, awe of his people and their woes.

It’s remarkable how the status of the secret has changed in literature, from the didactic eighteenth century prose that vilified men whose secrets manipulated others and invited disdain, to the revelatory secrets of suppression and internal angst in the stories and poems of women and minorities, to the deepest thoughts and notions of personalities that became as intriguing as the latest genetic discovery. Modern readers have relished their literary voyeurism.

Haslett, however, has turned that voyeurism about-face, taking readers into worlds they would never choose on their own. Even those who may be uncomfortable in the worlds of alternative lifestyles cannot deny that an authentic muse is confronting them. These are not pretty pictures he draws: the permanent marks on the mother-victim of a son’s demons; the stench of the chronically-ill boy who is tended by a remarkable lady; the doomed birth, lost husband, and family ghost that haunt an elderly matron; the sado-masochism of a teen without a father; the specter of death that renders a young Englishman’s life a hopeless case; and the twisted rationale of a mad genius who just may be Willy Loman’s crazy nephew.

These people may not actually exist, but Adam Haslett, through his art, makes us wonder.

Jeff Cebulski