Indeed, it takes very little time to register that someone crafty, perceptive, sharply funny, and struggling with a bit of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is manning the projector. Think Saul Bellow (Chicago setting, rollicking Jewish-style comedy) mated with Chekhov (unassuming, devastating detail), set to the twangy thump of early Tom Petty. Now that promises quite a love child.
As the novel’s title announces, love - and to a lesser degree, shame - underpins the human enterprise, whether it’s love coming, going, or gone. The book shares family with Orner’s well-regarded first collection, released in 2001, a series of loosely-linked pieces of fiction, called “Esther Stories.’’ His first novel, “The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo,’’ also features similarly fast fictional takes from multiple points of view. It seems to be the rhythm most natural to Orner, along the lines of the one- or two-minute songs of the Ramones, or more recently, the Magnetic Fields.
Of all the family members, Alexander Popper - a lawyer and “serial nostalgist’’ - is the one we spend the most time with, though the vantage shifts unannounced to grandparent, parent, brother, girlfriend. In this manner, with time and space so unstable - leaping, backtracking, colliding - the complex entanglement that is family is brought complexly to life.
Each of the Popper men is to a large degree confounded by love. The women they desire, invariably plucky and self-possessed, have to work to stave off being swallowed whole by their men. “Love and Shame and Love’’ offers no explanations for what so mysteriously arrives and sometimes disappears. “Why?’’ the Popper men want to know. Orner would suggest there is no why. He’s the rare sort of writer who not only exactingly paints life’s bewilderments and suffering, but induces the experience itself in the reading.
