[Below, Olsen offers a favorable assessment of A Handbook for Drowning.]

In his third book of fiction and first finely crafted collection of twenty-four short stories [A Handbook for Drowning], David Shields weaves a crazy quilt of psychologically haunting tales that explore drowning as a metaphor for obsession. Lots of people go under here, figuratively and literally, from the man who while scratching his girlfriend's back imagines penetrating right down to her vertebrae, to the university student who's unable to stop reading Prometheus Bound in preparation for a quiz.

Most of these are quiet, domestic, sadly funny pieces set fifteen or twenty years ago in suburban rooms, urban dorms, and sunny beaches in California and Rhode Island. Some, like "Father's Day," a tender account of a father and son attending a Mariners game, and "The Sixties," a whimsical rethinking of Leonard Michaels's "In the Fifties," are almost essayistic. At the center of each stands Walter Jaffe, a geekish young man who carries a bright, innocent belligerence within him, the kind of guy who rummages through his lover's stuff while she sleeps, reads her journal behind her back, and forces her to dance against her will in a sleazy bar.

Throughout, Shields uses up some paint left on his palette from the creation of his excellent first two novels, Heroes (1984) and Dead Languages (1989). Many ideas and even scenes from those return: a mother dying of cancer, a weak father's sins visited upon a son, failed lovers struggling for power, perils of college life in Providence, Proustian memory's importance, the persistence of basketball as an image of blocked transcendence, political and personal idealists trying to swim in an ocean that is anything but ideal.

While clearly obsessed with these signature situations, Shields seems at least as interested—probably more so—in generating surprising, precise, exquisite sentences, beautifully evident in the Barthelmesque "Gun in the Grass at Your Feet," the emotionally rich "Imaginary Dead Baby Seagull," and thematic pastiches like "Lies" and "War Wounds." In fact, Shields's final obsession is not with death and dying at all, but with a Nabokovian love of language, though perhaps in the end for him these ultimately come down to two sides of the same coin.