A kind of hip, post-1960's despair informs ["Lifetime," an] impressive collection of two novellas and three stories, the charm of the style in counterpoise to the anguish of the experience. To survive, Scott Sommer's characters take refuge in booze, drugs, sex, madness—anything to take the edge off loneliness and pain. All relationships in the corrupted world of these fictions are transient. In "Waiting for Merna," the temporary absence of the unemployed narrator's lover seems a rehearsal for an inevitable, permanent loss. The distraught older son in "Sickness," abandoned by wife and child, has returned to the madhouse of his parents' home. Mahoney, the hero of the title novella, has lost a woman he loves before the story starts and loses three more before the story is over. Love, which is of limited duration in this fictional world (and illusory perhaps even then), ends characteristically in disrepair and regret.

If the strategy of these stories tends to be post-modern in its imaginative use of literary form, the sensibility is romantic in the way of J. D. Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The brilliant "Entrapped and Abandoned" is presented as an imaginary love letter from the narrator, Taplinger, to a woman named Felice, whom he has provoked into leaving him. The narrator's nostalgia is the occasion of the story….

The compressed form of "Lifetime"—the action takes place over seven days and seven nights—and the surprise of the language permit the novella to transcend its near bathetic resolution. "Lifetime" has the resonance of a full-length novel and is the most ambitious fiction in this collection. The pleasures of the style are not the least of its rewards. (p. 7)

The longest piece, "Crisscross," narrated by an astonishingly precocious 10-year-old named Christopher, is the virtuoso performance of the collection. Set in Key West, "Crisscross," like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "The Catcher in the Rye," offers us an innocent's view of a casually depraved world. Abandoned by his father and mostly neglected by his childlike alcoholic mother, Christopher participates in the bizarre life around him like a parody of an adult…. Christopher's lot as a child bereft of childhood is implicitly poignant, but the action (the boy's misadventures in dope traffic) never quite moves us. The self-insistent charm of the narration works against the novella's deeper impulses, distracts us from its seriousness.

Despite a facility that tends to call attention to itself, Scott Sommer is a genuine discovery. He is a young writer—"Lifetime" is his second book—of exceptional resources of language and vision, an ironic chronicler of social depravity among fallen innocents. While these sad dazzling fictions are a legacy of growing up cool in the 60's, they are also—the other side of that sensibility—old-fashionedly romantic, disarming dirges for a world hopelessly lost. (p. 37)