PETER ORNER

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, NOVEMBER, 2001:

The skillful deployment of history and geography has much to do with the success of "Esther Stories," but all would be in vain were it not for Orner's mastery of language. He moves, seemingly effortlessly, between plain speech and more elevated diction, between short, flat sentences and sinuous, long ones. Consider this description of the sea captain and his wife after the girl, a teenager hired to help with the cleaning, carves her initials in their table. "Yet over the longer years--when the fish became scarcer, when they'd long since failed their vow to fill that house with children, when the silences between them sometimes lasted hours, when the captain's wife no longer paced the house, waiting for him, or word of him--an odd thing. They still talked about the letters."

Best of all, Orner is a true democrat. Most of his characters struggle to hang onto even one of the fundamental rights--life, love, the pursuit of happiness--but every character, young or old, well-to-do or broke, maimed or whole, is worthy of the author's insight and eloquence.

Walt and Sarah Kaplan, the protagonists of the third section, ''Fall River Marriage,'' are two excellent examples of this generosity of spirit. The owners of Kaplan's Furniture Store, they are overweight, talkative to the point of garrulity, not particularly well educated. Their lives have been somewhat constricted (they eloped to Providence when Sarah was 18 and their daughter was born six months later), but they emerge in these 11 stories as radiant, complex and heartbreaking. Separately and together, we see them during their long -- but not sufficiently long -- marriage: spending a day at the beach, watching the demolition of Walt's store, celebrating their daughter's wedding, talking to old friends.

The section ends not with the poignant, single-paragraph story of Walt's fatal heart attack but with the couple's exuberant elopement. When the young Walt pulls up outside Sarah's house, she seems to have changed her mind. ''She doesn't bother to shake her head and certainly doesn't need to use her voice to say no again. Her face: Never, never, never, never, never.'' He stares at her desperately, taking in her lipstick, her hat and her knees, ''fat little knees he could eat without mustard,'' until at last Sarah gives in (''Awright already'') and they are on their way. As he drives her toward the justice of the peace, Walt thinks: ''Hasta Luego, woods by the Watupa! Ciao, blankets and trees! A bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed.''

Neither here nor elsewhere does Orner offer a single narrative of cause and effect. Indeed, all the evidence suggests that he doesn't believe such a narrative is possible, that he is convinced that life can only be understood and represented in sidelong glances. But through these glances emerges something brooding, mysterious, ineffable, beautiful. At any moment, we have the feeling, everything might become clear. We keep listening for the voices in the walls.

- Margot Livesey, The New York Times Book Review