On ‘Tauvernier Street,’ tales of people finding their way

Aside from three of them, the stories by Atkinson, who teaches journalism at Boston University, depict small-town neighborhood life in the 1960s and in more recent decades. And you get the feeling, even when you’re not explicitly told so, that many of the characters grew up on Tauvernier or a street very much like it and that there’s really very little chance of truly breaking away.

In “The God of This World,’’ Bob Halloran, a “kid from Tauvernier Street’’ has risen up from heaps of the old neighborhood. Now, in post-9/11 America, he owns a development company. His plan to retire at 50 ends after a brief, but everlasting encounter with a Palestinian bomber at the local hardware store and results in a meditation on religion, politics, and fate.

The best stories, though, are nostalgic portrayals of neighborhoods like Tauvernier Street in the mythically simpler days when Yaz patrolled Fenway’s left field.

In the compassionate coming-of-age story “The Tex Cameron Show,’’ the narrator reminisces about his life as a 10-year-old who gets a robust dose of disappointment when he discovers his cowboy hero is not only just an actor, but also “a horse’s ass.’’ The 12-year old in “Two Mississippi’s’’ grows up in an ethnically changing area, where his father struggles to keep his butcher shop going, as “old shops and markets were being boarded up, and the people who were moving into the neighborhood ate mostly rice and beans.’’

Tauvernier’s residents aren’t just kids and their parents. Old Max Talbot’s unloving wife, Eleanor, waits for “the old buzzard’’ to die of cancer as he stares out at the Street.