[Kakutani is an American critic who writes regularly for The New York Times. In the following review of A Handbook for Drowning, Kakutani claims that Shields's plot takes the "seemingly mundane" and "invests it with layers of psychological resonance."]

In his last novel, the critically acclaimed Dead Languages (1989), David Shields turned the story of Jeremy Zorn, an adolescent boy with a bad stutter, into a kind of metaphor for the difficulties of communication and the limitations of language itself. Though the book occasionally threatened to buckle under the weight of its philosophical implications, its youthful hero and his family emerged as memorable and finely observed characters, people with the power to insinuate themselves into the reader's own imagination.

Now, in his latest book—a collection of interlinked stories titled A Handbook for Drowning—Mr. Shields works a variation on the material in Dead Languages, stripping away the more symbolic aspects of the story to focus on the coming of age of a young man. The hero of Handbook, one Walter Jaffe, is Jeremy Zorn without the stutter, a sensitive, introspective boy attempting to come to terms with his family, and to sort out his own sexual, artistic and intellectual impulses.

Like Jeremy, Walter has a self-absorbed mother, who is well known as a liberal journalist, and who develops cancer. And like Jeremy, he has an ineffectual father, who covers sports for a suburban California newspaper and obsessively rehashes details of the Rosenberg trial in his free time. The other subsidiary characters—a precocious sister and a college girlfriend with literary inclinations—also bear a decided resemblance to the supporting cast of Dead Languages.

Instead of writing a straightforward narrative, Mr. Shields has chosen to relate his hero's story through a series of interconnected tales that jump around in time, from Walter's college years to his childhood in the 60's and back again to his adulthood. This is a technique employed to powerful effect in such recent books as Tim O'Brien's Things They Carried, and Stephanie Vaughn's Sweet Talk, and Mr. Shields uses it here to create an elliptical portrait of Walter. The effect is similar to that of seeing a selection of snapshots from a stranger's life, arranged in seemingly random order. The reader is given a series of glimpses of Walter interacting with assorted family members and friends, and then is implicitly asked to connect these glimpses into an overall impression.

We see grown-up Walter taking his aging father to a baseball game for Father's Day, young Walter refusing his grandfather's demand that he grow up and take over the family's secondhand junk shop, grown-up Walter going through his dead mother's papers in search of something that might reveal the secrets of her heart. One story examines Walter's family's attitudes toward race and revolution in the 60's: his mother's embarrassing attempts to ingratiate herself with her black housekeeper, his father's efforts to discuss W. E. B. DuBois with a young man from Watts. Another story chronicles Walter's sexual explorations: his earliest experiments with masturbation, his adolescent visit to a massage parlor. Subsequent tales take up this theme and develop it further. We see Walter with a variety of girlfriends, trying to learn how to love, trying to learn how to rid himself of the emotional detachment he acquired in the wake of his mother's illness, and at the same time learn how to protect himself from further hurt.

"He danced, but alone and away from her, with his back turned toward her," Mr. Shields writes of one youthful romance.

The record repeated the sentiment that, if he couldn't love her, he didn't want to love nobody, and Walter, given his family history—his parents were in the middle of a trial separation; his sister's engagement to someone at school had just been broken off—distrusted the sentiment. He desired every gorgeous girl who walked past him on the street, but he thought he was uninterested in or incapable of loving any one of them in particular, even Leanne, although perhaps this was because he'd never loved any woman other than his mother, and about her he was feeling fairly ambivalent right now.

Although the prose in this volume is a bit more relaxed than that in Dead Languages, Mr. Shields again demonstrates his ability to conjure up the past by using lyrical, rhythmic language to relate ordinary domestic events. He possesses a gift for taking a seemingly mundane moment—an argument over a sweater, a nap on the beach, a hike in the woods—and investing it with layers of psychological resonance.

Indeed, these qualities seem more apparent in Handbook than in Dead Language, where the heavy metaphorical superstructure obscured the novel's more plebeian pleasures. All in all, this is a more fluent and engaging, if decidedly less ambitious, book than its predecessor. The reader only hopes that the author moves on to new material and characters in his subsequent work, discovering fresh territory on which to exercise his already abundant talents.