Light Action in the Caribbean
by Barry Lopez
Knopf

In his latest collection of short stories, "Light Action in the Caribbean," Barry Lopez demonstrates he has a few talents at work, other than those that have led to his reputation as a top chronicler of the natural world and his winning the National Book Award for 1986's "Arctic Dreams."

Yet tags like "great nature writer" — as well as "great travel writer," "great mystery writer," take your pick — can be limiting. A lot of folks slapped with these labels never branch out, choosing to stick instead with what got them where they are. In several moments throughout "Light Action," Lopez does his best to distance himself from "nature writing," particularly in the collection's title piece.

The story about a yuppie couple on a Caribbean vacation begins by innocuously cataloging protagonist Libby Dalaria's thoughts while she waits for her new boyfriend and gets ready to go to the airport.

In giving us a peek into Libby's shallow mind — on the plane, she breaks away to read an Allure article called "Boff Your Breasts for the Boardroom?" — Lopez recalls Bret Easton Ellis' tales of image-obsessed twenty- and thirtysomethings in books like "American Psycho" and "Glam-o-rama."

It's jarring, then, when the couple arrives in the Caribbean and the story dramatically changes gear. On a diving excursion, Lopez's characters suffer a horrible, violent — yet deftly written — fate.

In some ways this vengeance wreaked upon the story's superficial characters — to whom the tag naturalist is anything but applicable — is consistent with Lopez's status as a lover of the natural world. By choosing evil men as his villains, he breaks from expectations that would have him choosing something as mundane as a squall or a shark.

It's shocking, vivid writing, and the story's final pages stand above the rest of the stories in this highly enjoyable collection.

Not all Lopez's divergences work, though. One piece, "Ruben Mendoza Vega, Suzuki Professor of Early Caribbean History, University of Florida, Offers a History of the United States Based on Personal Experience," is a one-paragraph work, with 12 pages of end notes and bibliography.

In the hands of a gifted experimental short story writer like David Foster Wallace, this approach might be effective, but in Lopez's case, the piece seems forced and not thoroughly explored.

"Ruben," however, is really the only clunker in this slim book of great reads. "In the Garden of the Lords of War" is a writer's account of scarcely observed traditions in a post-apocalyptic world that little resembles our own.

"The Letters of Heaven" tells of how a young man comes to possess a set of vivid, erotic love letters exchanged between two saints. As the character wrestles with the decision to go public with the knowledge of the saints' love or follow tradition and keep the secret in his family, Lopez simultaneously makes the convincing, anti-Catholic point that love between God's servants is a natural, beautiful thing.

Having proved his ability to branch out, Lopez reverts back to his traditional form with aplomb, lending a modern voice and varied social and ethnic perspectives to naturalists of the sort found in Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. Lopez even goes so far as to conclude his title story by breaking away from the violence to follow a distant fisherman.

The guests from the hotel always liked it that he was wearing the Docker cut-offs his wife had fixed up and the J. Crew shirt or the shirt with the black Labrador. They liked his fish and his accent. They liked his laugh. He only had to get more fish, he thought, more fish and it was going to be good.

Papa would be proud.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)