Recently I delved into The Book of Regrets by Norman Waksler, courtesy of my friend Laura Cherry, who wrote an eloquent introduction to Waksler’s book. This is a short story collection by a North Cambridge librarian — a group of subtle stories about the quirky way life plays out. Many of the stories have a Seinfeldian dark comedy to them — a way in which the characters are both familiar and likeable, yet often tripping themselves up.

From Laura Cherry’s introduction:

What is it you most regret? The love lost when courage failed you? The friendship that eroded as you watched, helpless to shore it up? The words that might have brought comfort to someone now dead? Norman Waksler knows these things.

But The Book of Regrets is no mere catalogue of disappointments, no nihilistic checklist of roads not taken, no Aesopean romp through the standard virtues and vices. Nor will you find capital-R redemption accompanied by an overwrought violin score at the close of each story. Waksler has done what’s harder – to mirror our actual experience of regret: the consolation that seems small but, on second thought, will do to salvage pride and self-worth; the temporary epiphany that serves to carry us at least to the next moment; or, once every great while, the savage pinch of self-knowledge we can no longer ignore. Grudgingly or gratefully, Waksler’s characters take whatever satisfaction offers itself up: a stumpy Dutch cigar, an eye-opening moment in a museum, a strangely apposite encounter in a park, the limited catharsis of apology and of confession: “You tell me your unmentionable pain… and I’ll tell you mine.�

To inhabit these stories is to understand that even though what you hold dearest is inevitably tinged, tainted, muffled and mitigated over time, its value – its necessity – need not decrease. How can there be regret without love, or love without regret? Think of the thing that sets you apart, that defines you or stirs you. A photograph. A young sweetheart trembling with hunger. A dog – say, a too-intelligent terrier mix, huffing from the back seat. A quiet sense of order, the ability to keep chaos at bay. A book, a writer. Waksler knows how crucial these things are, how impure, and how devastating when lost.

Then there’s Waksler’s humor, the best kind, the kind with a knife in it. He evokes the deep humiliation that is, even as it occurs, also outrageously comical; all your friends’ foibles you must treat as jokes or be doomed to a lifetime of fury; the earnest childhood mistake you might recount only much later, deep in the night, to a lover. Waksler’s characters’ aches tend to congregate around things unsaid, untreated sores that fester precisely because they are unacknowledged. Yet he makes us aware that full exposure would be both excruciating and absurd. He presents ailments so ripe for metaphor you cannot help laughing through the pain. Waksler knows there’s nothing facile in what’s funny, nor in what’s curative. All depends on balance, good judgment, and timing.

But for me, the true test of a prose stylist is the detail work. Waksler is a master of conveying small facts, idiosyncrasies and telling details without seeming effort: the child’s keen vision of “thirty-two horizontal stripes� in the framed snapshot of his dead brother, or the “slight and tubular� body of his best friend. An incongruous black eye with its “ever evolving purples and greens lurid as a biker’s tattoo,� and the almost equally painful sympathy it engenders, “like being a small child and having your cheek pinched by a snaking conga line of a thousand inescapable, solicitous aunts.� And the food! Not every book can stir up a days-long craving for mediocre Chinese takeout – the crunch, the salt, every tactile moment of the meal, from the garlic-scented steam filling your car through the last drops of soy sauce licked from your fingers – or make an ecstatic experience of spreading an English muffin with apple jelly.

At the heart of Waksler’s collection is the pure pleasure of story: the self-defense of a boy suffering the daily assaults of a schoolyard tough; the failed bravado of a teenager trying to impress his date; a boss’s determination to be fair to his free-spirited employee; the vengeful fixation of a mild-mannered administrator-turned-vigilante. For all its disappointments, love is seen to conquer hunger, reluctance, assorted injuries, and even to take a stab at self-loathing. Perhaps most compellingly, Waksler gives us key moments in the life of Charley, a recurring character. Charley is hapless, generous, skilled at taking the precisely wrong measure of every situation. We see him trying always to “muzzle his pride, kennel his envy,� and do what’s right; blundering into trouble, into grace, by wholly reasonable means:

He understood the variability of friendships. How some are born in propinquity and die with distance, while others are always renewed despite separation and infrequency. How some just run out of feeling, others explode apart, and still others accrete goodwill year by year, meeting by meeting.

Charley believes his vast tolerance, his humane understanding of friendship as “balanced reciprocity within broad limits,� his deep affections and excellent intentions will carry the day, as they should. Instead, he shows us how it’s possible to fail to be forgiven, and to survive the failure.

What kind of stories are these? They are literate, intelligent and earthy, lofty and quotidian, earnest and ironic. They are the kind of stories into which you relax deeply, then stop short to take note of a particular word as if for the first time, or to say, “Hey, listen to this sentence,� to whomever else is in the room.

You might read The Book of Regrets to enjoy the mix of voices, to dip into empathy as into a cool (yet somehow caustic) bath, or to enjoy the occasional dollop of Trollope. Read it to see how what is said is always balanced by, in tension with, or canceled out by what is unsaid: “He couldn’t say that having finally spoken made him feel different, though he was glad to have done it.� Read it for its elegantly understated final line. Read for the wisdom of a writer who knows regret, love, and humor, and a great deal besides.

– Laura Cherry
Winner of the 2002 Philbrick Poetry Award