MCCORKLE EXAMINES HUMAN NATURE

   Moniva L. Williams
   The Boston Globe

   CREATURES OF HABIT
   By Jill McCorkle
   Algonquin Books, 256 pp.

   Jill McCorkle sees people for who they really are: imperfect, damaged, and vulnerable creatures who often resemble animals. In “Creatures of Habit,’’ a new compilation of short stories, McCorkle walks the fine line between humans and their animal kin.
   The protagonists in McCorkle’s stories are two-legged creatures who act like four-legged beasts, and the four-legged beasts who are part of their lives. The 12 tales are named for the “lower’’ species - cats, dogs, toads, turtles, and so forth - and liken the behavior of the characters to the creatures in the title. Naming each story for an animal seems a tremendous literary risk, even for a writer as gifted as McCorkle, but the result is peculiarly poignant.
   Each story is set in fictional Fulton, N.C., the site of previous McCorkle tales, and though the author now lives in Wayland, the creatures in this latest literary offering can be spotted in Anytown, USA. There’s the neighbor who unexpectedly drops by and interrupts quiet time with the spouse, the anxious child who can’t sleep before the first day of first grade, and the annoying relatives who drop by for a holiday barbecue. The denizens of Fulton aren’t quite “animals,’’ they’re just characters in life’s inexplicable drama.
McCorkle sets the stage by opening her collection with a quote from Charles Darwin’s “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.’’ What follows is a tale about a pack of seventh-graders who prowl the neighborhood on banana-seat bikes after the streetlights come on, chasing the mosquito truck through their neighborhood. These preadolescents in “Billy Goats’’ find more adventure than they bargained for as they struggle to understand the meaning of life and death. Although McCorkle’s writing in this tale is uneven, what’s undeniable is her ability to recapture the ambience of the long, balmy summers of youth. As this tale demonstrates, McCorkle’s writing is not always tight or orderly, but neither are the lives of the people she writes about.
   It’s been a while since the narrator in “Hominids’’ has seen childhood, and her fantasies are rooted in years of anger. She vows in a speech to her husband’s friends to open a restaurant called Peckers, instead of Hooters, with waiters instead of waitresses. Her male audience, gathered at her house with their wives during a golfing weekend, has just pushed her buttons by recounting their evening at Cafe Risque, a topless joint in town. The narrator chastises the men, peppering her diatribe with crass jokes to drive home her point. Could McCorkle be saying that full evolution never comes for some of us?
   Other tales in the book celebrate women at every stage of their lives, with startling resonance. Whether she’s a 20-something bride, a middle-aged divorcee who uses pets to keep unwanted guests away, or an elderly black woman who has worked menial jobs “every day of her grown life,’’ the narrator’s voice is always familiar. McCorkle’s ability to change voices seems effortless. Each narrator dares to ask the unasked questions, and sometimes voices what’s usually unspeakable. Consider the words of a woman with grown children who finds herself alone after a divorce: “Why . . . do women so easily settle in with their litters and nests; why do the females in nature blend into the background while the males remain flashy and continue life as sexual predators? Why was man created to continue giving life while women ran out of time, ran out of eggs?’’
   In the book’s longest tale, the honeymoon was over before it began. Lisa, a young bride, represses her doubts about marriage, then wonders if she has made a mistake after saying “I do.’’ Her story is aptly titled “Chickens,’’ but here McCorkle’s metaphors are extraneous.
   McCorkle is at her best in tales such as “Cats.’’ The middle-aged narrator in this story ponders what life would be like with — and without — her former husband. Her ex, a man barely 60 and in the throes of dementia (think tomcat) repeatedly wanders back to the home they once shared, forgetting that he no longer lives there. Each time he returns to her house, she hopes that something will snap him back to the present and his life with the woman that he left her for some 12 years ago. But with each visit, she hopes this is the time he’ll wander back to her for keeps.
   “Creatures of Habit’’ is the author’s eighth book, her most ambitious, and her most mature. It’s classic McCorkle: wise and witty. In fact, much of the drama picks up where “Crash Diet’’ and “Final Vinyl Days’’ left off. But what gives this collection its edge is McCorkle’s uncanny ability to find humor in the mundane, and even in the tragic. Just as the reader releases a chuckle, McCorkle suppresses it with death or divorce, disaster or disappointment. When McCorkle is at her best, it’s hard not to laugh through the tears.
   McCorkle is a gifted storyteller, and one of the masters of the short-story genre. Her “creatures’’ are women, Southern, and most of them are white, but McCorkle’s reach is universal. It’s hard not to read about one of her creatures and think, “I’ve been there.’’