By Lisa Schumaier
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, November 6, 2003

I picture his stories as someone would see the world while riding in the back of a pickup. Life is too dependent on the speed of things. At times, we move too fast to see the barbed-wire fences beside the road, the creases in the landscape, and yet we can only focus on the most distant but expansive things, like mountains. And even after hopping out of the bed of the truck, we still move in miles per hour.

"At the Jim Bridger" is Ron Carlson's latest book of short stories. Author of the acclaimed "Hotel Eden," Carlson has been getting a lot of attention lately as one of our finest fiction writers. Stories from "At the Jim Bridger" have appeared in "The Best American Short Stories" and "The Pushcart Prize Anthology."

But this information does not matter as soon as you begin reading.

"At the Jim Bridger" is the second story in a collection of 11. It is about a couple that celebrates the new year at a roadside restaurant called the Jim Bridger. When Donner sees a familiar face at the bar, he is forced to relive a painful and emotional story about getting lost in a snowstorm during a fishing trip. This man at the bar had come close to freezing to death and Donner had to save him, but it ended up that more than one life was being rescued.

However, his stories are not moral. They leave you startled and confused in the end. Re-reading, they appear strange and beautiful without ever professing only one conclusion. His writing leaves space for interpretation, and in that interpretation a chance to view real life from fictitious people. The reader feels like they are eavesdropping on personal and intimate moments between people - the second when the world opens up to them and reveals everything, it only confuses them more.

Except that each of these stories has something to bind the reader to them.

Carlson's prose is tinged with nostalgia. His stories are full of "poisonous seasons" and "warm, blond afternoons." He enraptures the seasons of living, in all their glory and terror, and delivers something graceful and full of movement.

"... Under the huge munificent blessing of the ancient poplar tree in her front yard, a real tree that held up the sky for a half of a mile in every direction ... a tree as gone as the house in which Debbie Delucca lived, under the blades for the interstate years ago, a tree we'll never any of us see again."

Reading Carlson is not far from taking a trip to the moon. Not necessarily to escape what seems overwhelming at times, but to get a better look at the planet we live on, realizing that our experience takes shape and we are rotating like all the others.