The pivotal moment in each of the three linked stories in William Styron's new book involves a memory of dissolution or release, one accompanied by a sudden rush of strong feeling. These are moments of breakthrough as well as breakdown, though unlike comparable fictional epiphanies (those in John Cheever's stories, for instance) the insights they offer are mostly psychological or social rather than visionary.

The memories in question belong to the narrator, Paul Whitehurst, Styron's thinly disguised fictional alter ego. In the first story, "Love Day", set on board a troopship in the Pacific in 1945, the narrator is twenty, a Marine platoon leader, "incandescent" with health, "golden", "almost fearless". The memory that overtakes the narrator has "a luminous, mnemonic clarity", and concerns an argument between his parents, one in which his normally restrained father denounces his mother's complacent (and complicitous) idealism. The memory binds Paul to his father, flooding him with homesickness and a "ravaging", "desolate" sense of "the power of history to utterly victimize humanity", a sense that instantly undermines his boyish talk of "gallantry" and "maniacal Japs".

The second story, "Shadrach", tells of an ancient black man, born into slavery, returning to die in the place of his birth. That place, a small town in Tidewater, Virginia, is the narrator's (also, presumably, Styron's) childhood home. The date is 1935, the narrator is now ten, and the moment of release he recalls involves a well-born but impoverished and overburdened neighbour, the last of Shadrach's "people". Here, again, breakdown feels like breakthrough, the narrative is suddenly suffused with emotion, and a truth about the world washes over Paul. The circumstances of the breakdown, moreover, recall those of the previous story; the outburst is precipitated by a similar combination of minor irritants and deeper-seated anxieties or instabilities, in this case a product of the Great Depression rather than war. A special virtue of the story is the child-narrator's astonished attentiveness to the old man's appearance, his description, for example, of Shadrach's unearthly hand, "warped and wrinkled with age; the bones moving beneath the black skin in clear skeletal outline".

Three years later, in the title story, the narrator's mother dies, after a long, painful illness. His father, exhausted with grief, turns on the town's well-meaning, fatuous minister and denounces ("execrates") God. The narrator's reaction to this third breakdown is revealing: "I wanted to stop my father—not for what he was saying but for fear he might become unpinned and fly out into space." This fear underlies all three memories; it also connects to the volume's epigraph, from Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial: "The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying." This is a book written out of fear of personal disintegration, in several senses.

Hence its stress on memory, which alone guarantees the self's integrity, both over time and at any one time (according to John Locke, at least). That there is an autobiographical dimension to the volume's fears of dissolution is suggested both by its immediate predecessor, Darkness Visible (1991), a harrowing memoir of clinical depression, and by Styron's open admission that the experiences the new book recounts "reflect the experiences of the author . . . are an imaginative reshaping of real events". The memories link not just the stories but the author-narrator's various identities—at twenty, ten and thirteen; they are attempts to anchor the self, to give it shape and meaning.

This anchoring is a matter of vital importance to Styron and his narrator, as is suggested by moments of sudden authorial intrusion. In the third story, for example, a minor character who attends the narrator's dying mother is said to possess "an arresting defect", an extra set of vestigial thumbs. "This is a grotesquerie that I almost wish I didn't have to record", the narrator tells us, anxious not to gothicize his Southern setting. "But it is an actual part of complex remembrance." In other words, the author's (or narrator's) personal needs take precedence—or are made to seem to take precedence—over artistic or aesthetic considerations.

The setting of the stories, Styron insists, "is not the drowsy Old Virginia of legend but part of a busy New South"; there are references to heavy machinery, military bases, a land "sucked dry by tobacco". But the prevailing atmosphere is pastoral, of idleness not bustle, of whippoorwills, "emerald-green" thickets, "a delicious winey smell of cedar". The setting is ultimately idealized, perhaps because it is filtered through memory; it is conventional, the South of Southern fiction, including Styron's own early novels. Also conventional is the Southern writer's tendency to see all things in Southern terms, so that the mother's complacency about war in the first story is proleptically a complacency about race. These familiar features are accompanied by the occasional cliché ("inscrutable passion", "stab of pain"), though for the most part the prose is determinedly plain, its air of transparency signalling—meant to signal—the very unity of self or personal coherence which is the narrator's great aim.