[In the following review, Taliaferro calls Searoad a pleasure, comparing its structure to that of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.]

Searoad is Ursula K. Le Guin’s “first completely mainstream book of fiction,” according to her publishers. This is good news for those of us who got hives when we first tried science fiction. Friends who were devout sci-fi readers urged us to start with novels of acknowledged merit like Dune or Stranger in a Strange Land or Le Guin’s own The Left Hand of Darkness. We’d have liked to make them part of our literary diet, but after a few chapters it was clear that our systems just wouldn’t accept the alien substance.

Searoad provides a reassuringly earth-bound way to make the acquaintance of this widely admired writer. As one who knows nothing about science fiction, I cannot comment on Searoad’s connections （if any） with that genre. But earthlings like me can read it with pleasure as a collection of related short stories that take place in Klatsand, a small town on the Oregon coast—a kind of Winesburg, Ohio of the Pacific Northwest.

There’s some social history obliquely recorded here; you can infer the class structure of Klatsand from Le Guin’s portrayal of locals and summer people, solid citizens and marginal ones, intellectuals and motel chambermaids, the misfit potter and the hippie entrepreneur who sells his ceramics. You can even trace the progress of real estate development. The same surnames recur and the interwoven family histories are the social fabric of Klatsand, but what’s interesting about Searoad is inner lives, private visions and thoughts unspoken.

“I looked at Lorena. Placid as a goldfish. But there are countries in her. She is a mystery. You live your whole life around the corner from someone, talk to her, and never know her. You catch a glimpse, like a shooting star, a flicker in the darkness, the last spark of the fireworks, then it’s dark again. But the spark was there, the soul, whatever it is, lighting that country for one moment. Shining on the breakers in the dark.” So one Klatsander sees another. Every so often, such a spark animates the numb familiarity of the everyday town.

The men in Searoad tend to be bullies or misfits or slightly ineffectual nice guys, like the middle aged one in “Geezers” who goes to the White Gull Motel for a restful weekend and is annoyed because people keep thinking he belongs to the jolly senior citizens’ group that’s also staying there. “Hernes,” the longest story in the collection, traces the lives of four generations of Klatsand women, from the 1890s to the present. Their men die off or philander or commit acts of male chauvinism that use up all the oxygen in the marriage. One of them, a feckless seducer, leaves this bright image behind him: “Out the window he goes, scrambling, because he thought he heard Mother coming, and the last I see of him forever is one leg, one foot, the sole of his shoe.”

“Men did seem to be so fragile,” muses an older woman pondering the imbalances of marriage. The real weight and complexity of these stories are borne by women, and the center of gravity is in the relations between mothers and daughters. Le Guin captures them in concentrated sketches that are very much of our time. Ailie, of “Crosswords,” works the graveyard shift at places like the Hiway House of Waffles, but she’s not a simple soul; the puzzle that endlessly vexes her is whether her mother acquiesced years ago in a stepfather’s sexual abuse of Ailie. Ailie can’t make her peace with her own daughter until she solves the riddle of her mother’s loyalties. In “Quoits,” Shirley achieves a kind of friendship with Jen, a fierce and uncompromising young woman who is the daughter of Shirley’s recently deceased lover, Barbara.

In stories like these, the circumstances have a topical, even a political interest, but the appeal of Searoad is in Le Guin’s power to move from the circumstantial plane to the meditative or even the archetypal. She matches images of women with kindred images of the natural world, presenting the landscape itself as a major character. The real-life mothers and daughters of Klatsand are the sisters of rain and foam, or of Demeter and Persephone, crying in their kitchens the elemental sorrows of the world.