A Very Good Book, by Dixon Long

If Dixon Long the writer wrote a story about the world, the world would be a better place. Not that the world would be without its terrors, but that they would be more clearly expressed and better understood.

His new book, "Weekend in the Luberon and Other Stories" (available, I understand, on Amazon) contains five stories and a novella arranged chronologically by the age of the principal character, from youngest to oldest.

The writing's earnest, in the way writer's as different as Sherwood Anderson and Herta Muller write earnestly: every word has clear purpose and everything said has meaning.

The stories move along as entertainments, but also fulfill the writer's responsibility to persuade, by any means possible and whatever technique he has at hand, the reader to consider his or her life seriously. They're worldly--set in New York, San Francisco, the south of France--and peopled by people of means who the writer places in relationships and situations that people with or without means might learn something from.

Each story presents believable characters and events, each rendered so believably and with such luminous humility that each is a whole little world unto itself. The first story in the book, "Time Zones", is as fine a hymn to the pleasures and confusions of sexual passion as the last story , "Harry Waiting," is to old age and death.