FIDELITY

Berry has employed all the forms he works in—poetry, the essay, fiction short and long—toward an examination of what it means to be placed: what here and elsewhere he calls ``membership''; American individualism-turned-loneliness seems like the nightmare that puts his eloquence to greatest use. Though only one of the five stories here, ``Making It Home''—a war veteran slowly walks his way out of horror toward his known identity, his own Kentucky landscape—describes it expressly, a cradling arc is the shape most fundamental to didactic art from Dante onward; in other stories as well, all set in the community of Port William (Remembering, 1988, etc.), often there is a rescue (such as that, in the title piece, of an old man from a degrading death-in-hospital) or an unnoticed support (``A Jonquil for Mary Penn'')—a floor beneath which one cannot drop. The negatives Berry creates as contrast material aren't done as well as the lightsome positives: a hapless Kentucky State Police detective investigating an abduction in ``Fidelity'' comes off as a straw man pelted by the Port William members with chalky stringencies. The members' inner darkness—such as the shame and desolation (uncamouflaged by urban noise) that the pathetic murderer/suicide in ``Pray Without Ceasing'' undergoes when faced with mercy—strikes more deeply. Ultimately, the prose of the stories less illustrates the Port William values—forgiveness, dignity, fidelity, community—than provides an indelible, sure- footed rhythm for them. Cadenced, eternal-seeming sentences everything; there is an enchantment to them. The last story—``Are You All Right?''—two neighbors going out at night to check on two others—feels almost like a dream whose template-like perfection you wake up shaken by: inevitable, simple, reaching. Uncommonly satisfying art and vision.