One Day's Perfect Weather
by Daniel Stern
Southern Methodist University Press

Daniel Stern is the best sort of literary thief.

"One Day's Perfect Weather: More Twice Told Tales" contains stories culled from the themes and undertones contained in various poems, stories and pieces of music.

They represent, in effect, the life of a work of art after the work itself is filed away and the reader's mind takes over.

Stern is that reader, but he is also the writer. The stories in "One Day's Perfect Weather" find their inspiration in Bach, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats. All of Stern's characters have some compulsion toward art, either through music, painting or writing. They reflect Stern's own career as a cellist, successful writer and voracious reader.

Stern structures each story around a central character who must invariably confront some personal conflict. We gain insight into the characters as they make decisions in an attempt to resolve the friction in their lives. In "A Man of Sorrows and Acquainted with Grief," Kraft, a high school music teacher, speeds along a highway in the Texas Bible Belt listening to Bach's "The Passion According to St. John."

When a police officer pulls him over, Kraft uses the blinding inspiration of the music as his excuse. Soon the whole town is buzzing with the news that Kraft, a Jew, has experienced a Christian epiphany. The community's false impression sparks a struggle in which Kraft must decide whether to conduct "The Passion," as the high school principal orders, or Haydn's 102nd Symphony, as Kraft originally planned.

Although well-wrought and technically proficient, some of the stories in "One Day's Perfect Weather" suffer from their overdependence upon another piece of literature or music. Jorge Luis Borges' "Funes the Memorious," for example, permeates Stern's "The Dangerous Stream of Time" so much that the main character becomes a literary cipher, rather than an autonomous character.

Nonetheless, Stern's stories should prove satisfying for the bibliophiles among us.

An important note: This isn't "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead." Stern develops his own characters from the ground up, rather than imagining a life for characters that already exist.

"One Day's Perfect Weather," the title story, is about an ailing couple, Mickey and Volya. Mickey, a famous theatric director, is dying. Volya, a dancer, is enduring an extended case of arthritis. They are bed-ridden and full of sarcasm. For his swan song, Mickey chooses to dramatize Robert Frost's "Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length."

Knowing their time together is limited, a line in the poem inspires Mickey and Volya to flee their bedroom and spend a day together, so that they may remember "one day's perfect weather" as the defining day of their relationship. The punchy, self-effacing dialogue brings the characters to life, making the final story of the collection the most passionate and powerful.

— Ben Welch (bwelch@english.umass.edu)