Hotel of the Saints

Anyone who revels in the slow, gentle pace and cumulative power of Ursula Hegi's writing (Stones from the River) will delight in the 11 stories in Hotel of the Saints. In the title piece, a young Jesuit brother helps his aunt redecorate her hotel in a kitschy, irreverent celebration of the saints (the toilet seat in St. Sebastien's room is replaced with an old wooden one that pinches the user). In "Moonwalkers," a young man stands by his father's hospital bedside after his heart transplant, inwardly reviewing their troubled relationship while his father drifts into memorylike reverie of the 27-year-old woman whose donated heart beats inside him. "Lower Crossing" is about putting to sleep an elderly family dog--a friend, essentially, whose life is in the narrator's hands. Some of these stories seem underdeveloped, but all have an emotional force that eddies out from their often minor premises. These are lovely short works from one of America's best novelists. --Regina Marler