Book Review: Drift and Swerve: Stories By Samuel Ligon

Samuel Ligon's Drift and Swerve.

Drift and Swerve: Stories
By Samuel Ligon
(Autumn House Press)

The characters in Samuel Ligon’s new short story collection, Drift and Swerve, don’t care what you think of them. Down on their luck, dissatisfied or just trying to make it, Ligon’s world is populated by people you see every day, but never notice. That girl smoking a joint behind the restaurant where you had dinner? That’s Nikki. She appears most frequently here, popping up several times in the collection’s 14 stories, and the reader follows this smart teenage transient as she makes mistakes and tries to start over, again and again. It’s a painful process, and you want to reach through the pages to give her a hand, which is what makes Drift and Swerve such a powerful collection. Formerly a professor at Suffolk County Community College in Selden, Ligon first broke through with the outstanding debut novel Safe in Heaven Dead (HarperCollins, 2003), and Drift offers similarly masterful fiction and well-drawn, deeply affecting characters: ordinary people at turning points, whether or not they realize this. Tales include a very young boy obsessed with war and violence, who is both learning and teaching about the power of a swastika; a group of suburban couples telling secrets and lies, each one worse than the one before; and a man who is trying to figure out his girlfriend, his life and his future, and oh yeah: He can’t stop noticing women’s breasts. At first, these characters nestled up against each other couldn’t seem more disparate, but then you notice the weird mix of hopeful and hopeless that each one carries around, like an albatross or an anchor, unaware of the weight, but being pulled down just the same. Ligon’s spare, elegant prose allows each person and place to be revealed in simple, truthful detail, without getting bogged down by the excesses that trap so many lesser authors. Drift and Swerve is a compelling collection of stories that aren’t just stories: They are the most intimate moments of the ordinary lives of the people you pass on the street. —Jennifer Kane