Of Sex, Death & Tallytown

Embalming Mom: Essays in Life by Janet Burroway Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 150 pgs. $24.95

Tennessee Williams said once that all good art is indiscretion. Janet Burroway's mother might have gotten a kick out of that. She seems to have spent a lot of time following the publication of her daughter's books on the phone to her friends, apologizing for the language and the sex scenes.

Burroway's newest collection of 16 essays is good art. Published individually since 1984, they're beautiful, self-aware, clean and deep as a Wakulla spring. They chronicle Burroway's coming of age in England among the likes of Sylvia Plath and her subsequent arrival in 1970s Tallahassee in search of a gas oven; they describe her efforts to make sense of loved ones who cultivate confusion and defy description.

Her mother is an eerie presence, up front in the title essay and a frowning ghost in the background of the others. In Embalming Mom, she dances through a battle of wills with her daughter, placidly ironing an old dress and batting aside her Janet's attempts to cast her as a character in one of her stories. Her daughter dogs her and she dances away, smiling, gently mocking. The writer always wants to know and show things truly; this writer's mother truly did not want to be known.

The essays in this collection are wise and funny, and cover all the bases: sex, death, divorce, children, ambition, etc., in a straightforward way that constantly jokes without being jokey:

...Chaos theory and critical theory, the Heisenberg principle, second and third thoughts about Orientalism and the supposed westward-headed history of this continent-these and a hundred other small and large holes in our hope of progress-suggest to us that clear sight is an illusion, perspective is all, and that all of us are bigoted willy-nilly by our vantage point. Science, it turns out, is another metaphor, having more to do with the way the brain works than the way the world does. Never mind; I'll tell a story about our cat.

The book is full of loving images of England, Arizona and Tallahassee-especially Tallahassee. The book is a wry send-up that will make wistful anyone who doesn't hate the place: "There was nothing of the north about it, and nothing of Florida, but rolling red earth with a smell of immaculate decay, massive oaks curtained in chigger-ridden moss, pines both thick and stark, and everywhere...a fecundity of flora that masked infection. The life cycle run amuck."

Setting aside, the essays in this book are true gems, whether you're fond of buggy moss or not. -K.M.

Mermaid Mystery

If the idea of aging human mermaids freaks you out, you might instead be comforted by the presence of Elvis. Though the King is dead and only truly graces Elizabeth Stuckey-French's new novel Mermaids on the Moon for a single awkward evening, he periodically rises up throughout this book like bubbles from an air hose.

Training for their comeback extravaganza, the former mermaids of the Mermaid Theatre in Mermaid City, Florida, reminisce about the night in 1961 when Elvis hit town and holed up in a seedy motel. He summoned more than one of their number to his hotel room to sip Cokes and quell his childlike fascination about what it feels like to live underwater and have a tail.

Things take a turn for the weird in Mermaid World when one of the Mermaids disappears, leaving her clothes in the closet and a note on the table-this turns out to be an old, bad habit. Her daughter France jets down from Indiana, then watches amazed as her father flies the coop upon her arrival.

France immediately inherits time-consuming daily care of her young, somewhat disturbed nephew, spending her spare moments combing through her mother's flaky friends in an attempt to find her. She cracks the code of Mermaid sisterhood, but garners only scanty clues that give her little headway in the search for her mother and more often than not mention Elvis at times when it is absolutely not helpful.

Stuckey-French's dry wit lets these well-drawn Mermaids move about in a light and amusing environment that skirts the too-cute. In a wonderful scene in a restaurant near the book's end, deep family secrets are served up at the same time as the Garlic Grouper. It's done so well you want to gag right along with the characters.

Mermaids on the Moon is full of native-Florida details, from the heat that makes you not want to move, to the peeling paint of a down-at-the-heels tourist attraction and the bickering amongst its oldest alums. There's also the stereotypical tinny trailer, stocked with cheap Mermaid figurines and a clairvoyant cat. It's a perfect Florida mystery, served up dripping, best enjoyed on the beach, but perfectly palatable anytime. -K.M.

Mermaids on the Moon by Elizabeth Stuckey-French. NY: Doubleday. 272 pgs. $21.95

Faces of Vanity

The short story as academic send-up is de rigeur these days, but it all too often softpedals what the life on campus is really like. Take the prototypical doddering old professor character- disruptive in department meetings, perennially excused for behaving unethically, being a slob, and resting-sleeping, really-on his laurels for decades. But since nobody likes unlikable characters, writers often soften the blow a bit, making the dirty old man-guy ever-so-slightly lovable in spite of himself.

That's not true of Mark Winegardner, whose characters are often unapologetically bad, not terribly self-aware, and absolutely real. There's Keegan, the elderly poet of "Keegan's Load," the last in "Tales of Academic Lunacy," a three-story mini-collection about academics inserted smack in the middle of this new book. He publishes only in vanity presses and is feared and loathed by all his colleagues, their families and anyone who visits campus. He's self-aggrandizing and incoherent; if he has one saving grace it's that he might finally be too old to seduce female students.

Luckily that job is dispensed handily by most of the other male protagonists in these three stories. Murtaugh (first name unknown and not bothered with), the focus of "The Untenured Lecturer," goes through so many co-eds in a semester that he doesn't bother remembering their names, finding it much simpler to think of them all as Christinas, "... the hippest young women at the squarest old schools, a plight from which Murtaugh offers brief deliverance."

Not knowing women real well isn't Murtaugh's only fault; he doesn't know himself a bit either. He's only mildly surprised when he can't answer a simple question from a friendly colleague, who wants to know what makes Murtaugh move yearly from college to college, one step ahead of the sexual harassment suits. He can't quite figure out why exactly his younger daughter might stand in his driveway in the rain, imploring him to grow up, as she does about halfway through the story.

Winegardner's characters all have a lot of growing up to do, and not just the male ones. Most of the women in this collection fall under the spell of a man, of youth itself or both; they're open books of raw emotion and bad decisions. The memorable protagonist of "Traveler's Advisory" skips her father's funeral to help set fire to her boyfriend's trailer, atoning by leaving cryptic messages on the dead dad's answering machine.

In a sense, Winegardner gets inside these characters' heads and is stuck there, narrating while they resolutely fail to gain insight into what's gone wrong. The result is a collection of very realistic, fascinating characters that we eagerly follow on all their ill-advised car trips from Ohio to Oregon to Florida, or wherever else they end up, just to see what they're going to do next.-K.M.

That's True of Everybody: Stories by Mark Winegardner. New York: Harcourt, Inc. 256 pgs. $24.00