DISCOVERIES

The Apple’s Bruise

Stories

Lisa Glatt

Simon & Schuster: 196 pp.,

$12 paper

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A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That

A Novel

Lisa Glatt

Simon & Schuster: 290 pp.,

$12 paper

There’s a quality to the best literary fiction that I’ve come to call “ominosity.” It’s not a writers’ workshop thing, like tension or conflict, nor what you feel reading a thriller or a detective story. It’s not a mere mood, like noir. It’s bigger, deeper, like an earthquake. Ominosity is a cultural tremor; it’s in the pores of fiction, a kind of warning.

Lisa Glatt, writing in our very backyard (Long Beach), has got ominosity. Here are the first three sentences of the first story (“Dirty Hannah Gets Hit by a Car”) in her new collection (“The Apple’s Bruise”): “Hannah lives in a southern California beach city without sidewalks, with lawns and flowerbeds that go right down to the curbs, and today, because it is Monday, trash day, those curbs are lined with fat green bags and reeking metal bins. And today, because her parents are fighting, she will walk across the street, stand on Erika Huff’s porch, and knock on the front door. And today, because Erika is sick, Hannah will walk to school alone.”

If Hannah, who is all of 7, gets to school alive, it will be a miracle, right? But of course, getting to school alive is the least of it.

In these stories and in her 2004 novel, “A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That” (now in paperback), Glatt plants clues, simple objects like curbs, facial scars and roads that the reader, trained in seconds by her no-nonsense language, anticipates and fears. She travels through emotional landscapes quickly, and these little clues are signposts to a world where seemingly distinct events organize themselves into messages like tornadoes building strength over the Great Plains.

In “The Body Shop,” a husband slings a stripper over his shoulder and carries her offstage. The next-door neighbor climbs an oak tree that the city has threatened to cut down. A daughter has run away from home. Explanation? None. Denial and the willful blindness of Glatt’s characters contribute to the ominosity.

In “Animals,” a woman refuses to see that her little sister, just 14, is an experienced seductress and kleptomaniac. Her husband, a good man who is not immune to little sister’s charms, tries in vain to tell his wife. Something’s got to give.

This sort of sexual tension is not the kind found in everyday fiction, the will-they-ever-get-together kind, but the mom-is-dying-in-the-room-next-door-so-I’m-going-to-have-as-much-sex-a s-possible kind. The ominous kind.

Not that there isn’t some sweetness, some respite in Glatt’s world. In “Bad Girl on the Curb,” a man and his wife, who has been diagnosed with breast cancer and has had one breast removed, watch as a young girl outside their apartment is arrested for drunk driving. The girl sits on the curb while the police question her. The couple imagines her life.

Perhaps that is the key, the escape hatch Glatt offers her readers: Can you imagine a person’s life? Can you see what makes that girl rush headlong into marriage, ostensibly because she’s pregnant, even as she expects, no, knows that she will miscarry? Why does Rachel, in the novel, tell her many boyfriends that she hasn’t married because her mother needs her when she knows perfectly well it is she who needs every last second of her mother’s remaining time in this world?

Glatt’s characters are a bit like rats in a maze, pushed to the next false turn by unnatural forces: poverty, pollution, toxicity in its many forms. There are nice men and mean men. There are bad girls and good girls. And both kinds are terrified.

But it is the girls in Glatt’s fiction who are the lightning rods for the dissolution of our culture. If the women are unhappy, the society is unhealthy, so say shamans and sociologists. In her novel, Glatt shows how it can happen:

“ ‘Biology class is okay, then?’ her father continued, lifting up a chicken leg and taking a bite. Georgia watched his mouth and thought about all her secrets -- all of them. She held onto the table with clenched hands ... and wondered what her father saw when he saw her. His chin and lips glistened, and she wondered what he’d think and remember of the girl she was becoming....”