Laura Bonazzoli’s book “consecration pond,” published this fall, comprises 11 interrelated stories set in a rural community surrounding fictional Consecration Pond, which seems to be located on Maine’s midcoast.

Each story is told by a different character, all of whom live in the community and refer variously to each other and to common events, from different times and perspectives. An unusual feature is that in almost all the stories, the narrator is directly addressing another character who has no part other than invisible listener. In the opening story, Walmart employee Lucy tells her neighbor the story of her college astronomy instructor taking advantage of her innocence, naivete and simple nature. The neighbor never appears in any scene, but is the object-listener to whom Lucy directs her words.

The same narrative device operates in most of the other stories. In “Wild Geese,” teenager Gus talks to his deceased friend Wells, who died of a drug overdose probably spawned from bullying he experienced for being gay. In “Paper Lanterns,” elderly Evelyn talks to her dog Roy about her heart problems, her family and her doctor. Evelyn later figures in “Crossing the Dark” in which her grandson, Marty—an astronomy instructor—is speaking to his partner, Sean, on the day of Evelyn’s funeral. In “Spring Ice,” Gus’s lonely high school English teacher is talking to an interviewer who might metafictionally be the writer of the stories; he offers a wandering, hazy reminiscence on Gus’s death and his imagined connection between himself, a Vietnam War veteran, and Gus’s dad, a Gulf War veteran. Gus’s mother, Sieglinde, reveals to her therapist harrowing inside information about the family in “Under a Spotlight Moon.”

To me the most well-realized story in the group is “Frogs and Goddesses.” Alice Byrne, a painter and visual arts instructor approaching middle age, tells to her deceased mother the story of her relationship with Celine, an academic colleague in the biology department who uses frogs in her research. Alice is filled with all kinds of regrets, a condition the story cleverly frames by opening with her nearly neurotic second thoughts about comments she made to a TV interviewer, which she hopes Celine, the lost lover, will not hear. This leads to Alice’s regrets about not having shared enough of her life with her mother, which leads to what amounts to a confession, in which Alice recounts in minute, egocentric detail the various frictions she felt before, during and after her rocky affair with Celine. In Alice’s paintings of frogs are figured tensions between art and science; self and lover/other; authenticity and gesture—all disclosed both wittingly and unwittingly by a narrator who cannot free herself of hollow gestures.

Each story in “consecration pond” stands on its own, and despite the book’s subtitle, they do not together form the continuous narrative normally expected of novels treating conventional realistic material. None of the stories tells the whole story, and many of the literal connections between them are implicit, requiring of the reader some William Faulkner-like piecing together. The resulting overall effect has neither the coherence of a fully realized novel nor the sharp impact of a short story, but instead a general feeling of mythic distance. This feeling surfaces full-blown in the next to last story, “Consecration Pond,” in which a storyteller relates a sort of fable of the prehistory, settlement and artistic development of the place. It’s a book assembling bits and pieces of a community’s life.

Laura Bonazzoli, of Rockport, is a freelance editor. “Consecration pond” is available through local and online book sellers.

Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first and third Fridays of each month. Dana Wilde is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact him at dwilde.offradar@gmail.com.

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