Odes to an Older World, With Cameos by Cézanne and Hawthorne

THE BAR AT TWILIGHT: Tales, by Frederic Tuten

In “Lives of the Artists,” a brief story in Frederic Tuten’s engrossing new assortment, a pair goes to see Jean-Luc Godard’s “Bande à Half,” which contains a dance sequence that breaks in unexpectedly, “like a flowerpot tossed from a cloud.”

“A flowerpot tossed from a cloud” can be a great way to explain the pleasures of “The Bar at Twilight,” which incorporates appearances by artists and writers equivalent to Delacroix, Montaigne, Hawthorne, Melville, Monet, Gauguin, Cézanne and van Gogh.

This isn’t shocking coming from Tuten, who, at 85, has had an extended and distinguished profession not simply as a fiction author however as an artwork and movie critic. Lots of the tales are set in Europe, and there’s a robust vein of Francophilia that runs by these pages. Characters who’ve by no means realized French all of the sudden begin to converse “that sex-soaked language the place a noun seems like a flirtation.” Even horses break into it, in addition to gorillas, who “beat their chests and cursed in gutter French.”

Readers in search of the consolations of extra conventional narrative will discover a few gems. “Winter, 1965” is a beautiful ode to a misplaced New York Metropolis and to a literary world the place brief tales had been mailed in manila envelopes and a narrative plucked from the slush pile at a small journal might set a author on the trail to fame. The protagonist, a younger author who has had a narrative accepted by Partisan Assessment, imagines himself about to be ushered into the corporate of Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy and Robert Lowell, solely to find that his story isn’t within the problem it was purported to be in and is unlikely to be revealed in any respect.

“The Restaurant. The Live performance. The Bar. The Mattress. Le Petit Déjeuner” takes place in additional modern occasions (somebody has a cellphone), nevertheless it, too, evokes an older, misplaced New York, the place the bartenders on the Carlyle scolded you for necking and muggers on Fifth Avenue referred to as you “sir” as they relieved you of your money. There are hints of Cheever on this story, and although the dialogue will be snappy and arch (“You could have a brand new fragrance?” “Sure, do you prefer it?” “Find it irresistible. Like rags soaked in a dying man’s urine.” “That good?” “Like a sewer overflow in Fez.” “Don’t flatter”), what emerges is a bittersweet portrait of a wedding and a metropolis which have survived bodily and psychic ravages.

The opposite tales are much less conventional, each narratively and domestically. There are husbands and wives, however whether or not they stay with one another appears immaterial to them. What drives them is the want for solitude (most of the characters have cats — firm, as one character places it, that’s “the identical as being alone”) and a love of artwork. One character praises Cézanne for having skipped his mom’s funeral to be able to paint, and one other loves gardens due to Proust however feels no want to go to them as a result of Proust has already taken him there. Just like the centaurs who characteristic in one of many tales and whose “heads and ideas are excessive as much as the dreamy stars” whereas their rears preserve them on the bottom, Tuten’s people are half on earth, half within the ether, and sometimes the ether wins out.

This will result in a sure emotional abstraction, however these tales’ virtues greater than compensate. Tuten’s prose is all the time very important, typically dazzling: “A helicopter hung, like a mosquito, within the icy membrane of the sky.” A girl’s head emerges from her housecoat “like a white bean squeezed from its pod.” Work are turned to the wall “like punished college students.” Sparrows sing “their besotted serenade.” Hearth hoses quiver “like flattened pythons.” A girl’s purchasing luggage, coated in snow, are “child igloos.”

The final entry within the assortment is a brief essay, half paean to books and to a lifetime of studying, half aesthetic manifesto. In it, Tuten has some selection phrases for “likable” or “relatable” protagonists, “the anticipated staples of standard-issue fiction,” and he holds up Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood” as a mannequin for the way in which it “sidesteps the foundations of normative — and predictable — fiction.”

Tuten might simply be speaking about his personal work. “The Bar at Twilight” is neither normative nor predictable, and it bears the agency impress of the soul.

THE BAR AT TWILIGHT: Tales | By Frederic Tuten | 282 pp. | Bellevue Literary Press | Paper, $17.99

Joshua Henkin’s most up-to-date novel, “Morningside Heights,” is out in paperback. He directs and teaches within the M.F.A. program in fiction writing at Brooklyn School.