I gave Lee K. Abbott's “All Things at Once” (Norton, $26.95) the open-to-a-story-at-random test. The first line in “Gravity”: “They grab her – Tanya, my fourteen year-old daughter – early in the afternoon from the sidewalk outside the north entrance to J.C. Penney's at the Mimbres Valley Mall.” What follows is a full-throttle, foreshortened, sandblasted tale of disassociation and heartbreak set in a sere and superficially serene New Mexico town. A lesser writer would've made it a novel.
"Picking up one of Mr. Abbott's stories is like stepping into a rushing stream. Before you know it, you've been thrown up on the bank in a place you never anticipated, because you, like his characters, felt you knew what was happening, and that you had control. In his stories, no one ever does, not really. People go crazy as they obsess about war and sex and death and UFOs, among other things."
"Come read some painstaking prose about real people. I promise you won't hate yourself in the morning."
