Richard Scharine’s The Woman in the Third Floor Front is a story collection arranged in sections: Utah, Law and Order, Past Lives, and Close to Home, and it moves through romance, regional fiction, political reflection, memory, family, and elegy with unusual ease. The title story opens with Jack, hobbled after a motorcycle crash and freshly divorced, stumbling by chance into a stopover town where an airline delay, a widow who runs a hotel and massage business, and a child grieving his father turn accident into reprieve; elsewhere, the book ranges from a journalist’s reckoning with western land politics in “When I Go, I Leave No Trace” to intimate, family-centered pieces later in the volume that turn more openly autobiographical and reflective. What binds the collection is Scharine’s interest in people who are no longer where they thought they would be, yet are still trying, stubbornly, to make a livable meaning out of the remainder.

What I admired most was the book’s tonal confidence. Scharine is willing to let a story be earnest without turning syrupy, and willing to let intelligence arrive wearing ordinary clothes. In the title piece, music is not decoration but structure: standards and country songs keep surfacing as emotional evidence, almost like witness testimony, and by the time Constance answers “He’ll Have to Go” with “He’ll Have to Stay,” the scene has become both a small-town performance and a public act of choosing life again. I also liked the collection’s tolerance for crookedness, for wounded people, compromised people, people who embarrass themselves before they improve. Jack is not noble at the outset; that matters. The redemption here is not glossy. It limps. That gives the best stories a hard-earned warmth rather than a prefab glow.

Scharine sometimes overexplains a motive or theme just after dramatizing it well, and now and then the narration steps in with a teacherly finger raised when the scene has already done the work. But even that has a strange charm, because it feels continuous with the book’s larger personality: learned, conversational, unembarrassed by references to songs, politics, Shakespeare, journalism, and grief all sharing the same table. I came away feeling that the collection’s real subject is not plot but afterlife in the secular sense, the second act after divorce, bereavement, disillusionment, professional diminishment, or the long weathering of a place. Several later pieces deepen that feeling by turning toward kinship, memory, and haunting, making the book less a display case of separate stories than a cumulative meditation on what remains.

I’d recommend The Woman in the Third Floor Front to readers of literary fiction, short story collections, regional fiction, character-driven fiction, and contemporary historical fiction who like humane books with a little grain in the wood. Readers who admire the plainspoken emotional intelligence of Kent Haruf, or the way Elizabeth Strout lets ordinary lives carry uncommon weight, will probably find familiar pleasures here, though Scharine is more discursive and more musically inclined than either. This is a book for people who believe stories can be rueful, civic-minded, romantic, and haunted all at once.

Pages: 164 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GGF1V3BC