Peregrinations

“Tales of Accidental  Genius”

Simon Van Booy

Harper Perennial, $14.99

Reading the novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Simon Van Booy’s own biography, one learns of the surprisingly disparate number of places where he has lived: rural Wales, Kentucky, Paris, Athens, and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And he hung out in the Hamptons for a while. Perhaps there were more addresses. But why mention all of these locales? The reason is endemic to Mr. Van Booy’s thinking and to the actions of his characters. 

This collection of short stories is head-spinningly international, embracing cultures and characters of extraordinary diversity: Chinese, German, Russian, Swiss, Texan, Los Angeleno, Southamptonite. While making us understand how specific place matters when focusing on the universal. 

In his writing Mr. Van Booy often comments upon the importance of talismans — he is careful to bring those talismans from the place where they originate to an unexpected location. 

Take, for example, his short story “The Muse.” A renowned Russian-born fashion designer, Alexandra, seemingly based in America, arrives in a European city. Tired from her flight, she is checking into the lobby of a swank hotel where she encounters a man in the lobby whose coat button is dangling by a thread. Rather than retire to her room, she asks him if she can sew on the button. 

The encounter is innocent. The reader learns that the sewing kit this designer pulls from her pocket in order to sew on the button was a specific bequest from her grandmother. The reader learns that Michael Snow is a screenwriter from Hollywood who was taught the art of screenplay writing by a mentor now long gone. This screenwriter goes to hotel lobbies to write the whole night long then sleeps all day. 

Alexandra asks why he doesn’t just write in his hotel room. The screenwriter says to the fashion designer: “Maybe in order to make people up, I need to see real ones.” We are left pondering whether what we are reading is true or fictional. In other words the most basic questions regarding art and life. 

In one of the story’s flashbacks, the reader sees the fashion designer figuring out how to create new fashion lines. “Each new collection began like this, in a city with no association. Alexandra would wander the streets, stroll through a bustling market, ride an empty bus — drink coffee in a dockside cafe as birds circled the open mouth of dawn.” 

In Berlin she follows this procedure and happens upon the shop of a watchmaker. She asks him about the watches and clocks he repaired that were never claimed. At first reluctant, he allows her to see the timepieces and then he talks and talks about them. She creates a new fashion collection she calls Zeit Verloren. “Time Lost.” “The Muse” is a story about time lost and time that is found. 

But back to the talisman: When Alexandra doesn’t expect it, Michael slips a Star of David from his mentor into her bag. All the time knowing that she might not discover the small symbol that was so important to him for a very long time. But he feels obliged to thank her for her kindness, for her attention to another, and, most of all, for her attention to his art, his writing. “Language merely points,[Alexandra] had read once in a book of German poetry; the rest must be imagined.”

Mr. Van Booy’s short story “Infidelity” is not so much about what happens between the sheets but what happens at the table. One particularly intriguing passage that also pulls the reader from one place to a very different one occurs when characters are at dinner in Los Angeles where a character, David, says:

“The goat cheese is good. . . . But I prefer the lobster bisque at Silver’s in Southampton.”

“Maybe my parents will take the kids there for lunch,” [his wife said].

“Oh my God, the desserts,” David said. “I could go there just for the desserts.”

How much is going on with those sweets. Here and there.

The centerpiece of Mr. Van Booy’s collection is “Golden Helper II,” an intriguing set of modern Aesop tales. Mr. Van Booy not only threw himself into Chinese-based stories with this work, but diligently studied Chinese. In one section he empathizes with a character saying:

“When our son acts badly, make a joke so he’s not embarrassed to admit he was wrong.”

“Although Little Weng is big now, put your arms around him once a day.”

“Make him eat until bursting.”

These “Golden Helper II” sections are earnest, heartbreaking, full of the tensions of modern life with the over-lading of the past.

Mr. Van Booy’s talent for metaphor shines throughout. In his story “The Goldfish” he writes: “For the first hour he drifted from room to room as if he were a fish himself, marveling at the different colors and shapes, and how some came right up to the glass.” Those fish are so evident. It was for good reason that Mr. Van Booy received a Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for his second book of short stories, “Love Begins in Winter.”

Now, a seeming departure for a review, but an oddly apt note: Mr. Van Booy dedicates this book to Barbara Wersba, a longtime East End writer. Mr. Van Booy’s gratitude to Ms. Wersba is not only touching, but also important given the importance of mentors in the lives of writers. Ms. Wersba was nominated for a National Book Award for “Tunes for a Small Harmonica.” Some of her other books include “Love Is the Crooked Thing,” “The Farewell Kid,” and “Walter: The Story of a Rat.”

Talk about locales: She was born in Chicago, lived in California, attended Bard, then returned to Greenwich Village, ending up on North Haven, having established a press on the East End because she cared so much about writers and writing and books. 

Mr. Van Booy was once interviewed as saying: “One of my literary heroes, Barbara Wersba, said that you never finish a book, only abandon it.” Yet one senses that he will never abandon his mentor, speaking about her at length in a recent Diane Rehm NPR interview. One of the most appealing qualities in any writer is loyalty to the craft, to the word, to the teacher.

“Tales of Accidental Genius” is at times wistful. As well as playful. Intuitive and always substantive. In “The Muse,” when the fashion designer Alexandra comments upon Michael Snow’s screenplay after their chance encounters, she crosses out “Untitled” on his title page and proposes another title: “The story of love is also the story of loneliness.” In Mr. Van Booy’s stories we are transported everywhere and there and back here. At this time and that time. And all around again. 

Laura Wells is a regular book reviewer for The Star. She lives in Sag Harbor. 

Simon Van Booy will read from “Tales of Accidental Genius” at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m.