Midway through Kevin Canty's new story collection, "Where the Money Went," a man climbs into bed beside his wife. It has been a long, trying day: Their 4-year-old son Walter, who occasionally bites other children, has sunk his teeth into the arm of a day care classmate.
" 'Things will get better,' I whisper.
" 'I don't know,' she says without turning. Then, after a moment, she says, 'Things will get different.'
"Then, a few minutes later, when I am sure she is asleep and I am awake beside her and thinking about money, she says, 'I can feel it coming.' "
"Where the Money Went" abounds in such vaguely prophetic moments. Like a backroom film projectionist, Canty cues to the moments when his characters realize that, due to past blunders or to present forces beyond their control, their lives are about to change. Often, as in the case of Walter, the surface action -- the bite itself -- is merely a summons of life's latent discontents. In negotiating the fallout of Walter's bite, Walter's father is forced to confront the long-standing, shelved fractures of his marriage, providing him with new perspectives of his loyalties and responsibilities to Walter; to his touchy, distant wife; and to himself.
In striving to chart such shifts in consciousness, Canty has taken up one of the short story writer's enduring, most challenging tasks. In these stories, set against the hot and dusty backdrop of the American West, Canty, the author of three previous novels and two story collections, proceeds from a point of past trauma: divorce, a car wreck, the death of a spouse.
In "The Emperor of Ice Cream," a young man named Lander visits his semi-dysfunctional family on a lake in Bigfork, Mont., where his financially strained father's midlife crisis has revealed itself in the form of a large motorboat costing a thousand dollars to fill with gas. Lander sees his younger brother Tim for the first time since the accident: Earlier that summer, Lander turned left into the path of an oncoming pickup, which killed the other driver and injured Tim, who was in the passenger seat, so that he now seems like "some small shrunken version" of his former self. The sight of his brother causes Lander to feel "a pang of fear run through him at the damage done."
