You Can Sleep While I Drive: Stories

You Can Sleep While I Drive: Stories

SMU Press, 254 pp., $19.95

The title of Liza Wieland's second collection of short fiction, You Can Sleep While I Drive, evokes a reassuring tenderness. Throughout these stories, Wieland encourages us to dream along with her as she skillfully guides her characters -- and, by extension, us -- through occasionally surprising territory.

Wieland is fascinated both with the mystery of the physical body, its unfathomable mortality and willfulness, and with motion, how it can fill a body and become more desirable than any destination. In the title story, Mack Reinhart travels West to meet the son he abandoned as an infant, who is dying of AIDS. Driving, Reinhart rehearses the stories he wants to tell his grown son, all the words that he hopes will manage to bridge the unforgivable distance between them. "I don't know you," he imagines saying to his son, "but I love you, all the wrack and ruin of you standing here before me."

Leaving and being left feature prominently in many of these stories, but Wieland makes the (perhaps obvious) point that physical separation is only a metaphor for emotional distance. Like planets in separate orbits, her characters are kept apart by forces as powerful as gravity and as natural as light. In "Salt Lake," Em Stanley prepares her invalid mother for death. Mary Anne Stanley is described as a woman who has worked to remain mysterious to her daughter. Physical proximity has not made her any less an enigma to Em. Learning the secret of her father's identity helps Em begin to understand her mother, although she realizes that she will never fully comprehend.

Wieland has faith in words and she expresses that faith through these lovely, fluid, character-driven stories. Her sentences pour across the page like clear, fresh water. While she seems to have few compunctions about giving the reader an occasional whack in the head with a blunt theme and sometimes builds a story on a premise that seems all too familiar, still her characters are vivid, their psychological journeys marked by unexpected revelations and honesty. You Can Sleep While I Drive bears out the promise of its title, enough for a reader to feel genuinely grateful after turning the last page.