Fiction

Cameron ("One Way or Another") seems to be a writer who works best against the grain of his own experience. It's the characters most remote from him, in age, gender or oddity, who come most fully alive. Among these are a man who responds to unspecified marital problems by adopting an imaginary dog, a retarded youth just smart enough to know that nobody wants him, and an old woman afraid to ask her dead landlady's relatives whether she's about to be evicted. The final three stories focus on a small-town Indiana family from several points of view. Here Cameron's people begin to act--a stern matriarch has an affair with a banker; her granddaughter runs off with a black man--having found a source of depth outside setting and plot: one another.