Living in the small English coastal holiday town of Glass, most of the romance-hungry characters in the stories of D. Wystan Owen's Other People's Love Affairs are grown-ups with grown-up yearnings for connection. They are not hormonal teens or 20-somethings swiping Tinder and stalking bars for hookups. The pithy opening story "Lovers of a Kind," for example, tells of the sympathetic pediatric nurse Eleanor making do with her unmarried life, nurturing a local itinerant scavenger, and caring for her ailing father. As the story concludes: "Restraint and a pleasant, underwhelming contentment prevail, still, in the affairs of her life." As in Sinclair Lewis's Winesburg, Ohio, Owen's citizens of Glass share the somewhat melancholic condition of loneliness and diminished expectations. Yet, they are a plucky lot whose dreams and passions are waylaid by circumstance and tough luck.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and co-founder and publisher of the Bare Life Review (a periodical devoted to immigrant and refugee writing), Owen crafts delicate portraits of his characters' often complicated lives. A spurned club owner still adores his headlining jazz singer, a single mom. An alcoholic acts as stand-in father to an orphaned six-year-old boy being raised by an aunt. A widower goes to a movie theater to reminisce about his first romance in its seats. These are caretakers, shopkeepers and artists on the downside of careers, but they are neither defeated nor cantankerous. Instead, most look back with "fondness in the memory of youth's urgency, gratitude for a passion, however short-lived." Other People's Love Affairs is an impressive debut. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.