Characters on the Loose

Perhaps like olives or Brussels sprouts, minimalist fiction is an acquired taste. Flat, telegraphed accounts of lives so ordinary as to be practically invisible are the provinces of the minimalist writer, and in such stripped-down environments, one misstep is enough to send a story spiralling into the abyss of bad writing that is both affected and ridiculous. Fortunately, writer Janet Kauffman has an excellent sense of balance. In earlier collections, she has written eloquently, if sparely, of the inarticulate lives of farm families; a farmer herself, her hardscrabble stories are as real as the earth her characters tilled. In her short-story collection Characters on the Loose, Kauffman has decided to venture from the starkly real into the experimental.

In "26 Acts in 26 Letters," Kauffman presents an erotic alphabet, describing letters performing various sexual acts--complete with illustrations. In "Signed Away," she imagines Emily Dickinson on a bike trip. Not all of the stories in Characters on the Loose are quite as unusual as these, and several are vintage Kauffman. There's enough of the old Kauffman and the new in this collection to satisfy both her die-hard fans and those readers unafraid of something different.