Short Takes

Valentines: Stories
By Olaf Olafsson
Pantheon, 224 pp., $23

Olaf Olafsson is a master at describing the moment when a calm surface cracks. His lovely, restrained stories are taut with suspense as they move inexorably toward a revelation. We know the peaceful complacency of a situation is about to smash; suddenly, years of vague feelings coalesce into a moment of clarity.

In the most shocking story, a man chooses to save himself rather than his 6-year-old son when their boat capsizes. His wife watches from their house on the shore, and what she sees will completely alter her view of her competent husband and their contented life. Another marriage ends when the wife reveals that she has been having a lesbian affair with her best friend for many years. Acknowledging the betrayal in the most straightforward way, she expects her husband to accept the affair and its consequences with the same cool ease. As she proceeds with ruthless efficiency to find an apartment, empty the house, and sell its contents, he says and does nothing -- until his reckless rage shatters her organized schedule.

The Time It Takes to Fall
By Margaret Lazarus Dean
Simon & Schuster, 305 pp., $24

The Challenger astronauts did not die instantly in the 1986 explosion that turned their routine flight into a spectacular disaster, but fell for 2 minutes and 45 seconds before the force of their capsule's impact on the surface of the water killed them. This horrific detail, worked out by Dolores, a 13-year-old physics whiz, blows away her last bit of comfort. Dolores lives in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and is taken to watch many of the shuttle launches by her father, an engineer who works at NASA. Dolores keeps a "Space Notebook," meticulously listing all the shuttle launches. She idolizes the astronaut Judith Resnik, and is determined to be an astronaut when she grows up.

In the course of this closely observed and carefully constructed novel, she grows up fast. She discovers love and sex and distinguishes between the two, she detects adultery and deception, she recognizes her parents' failures, suffers their neglect, and appreciates their (mostly ineffective) efforts to provide stability . Eventually, she comes to understand that life, unlike physics, does not follow fixed laws. Still, she is a very real girl, often an ornery, contrary, and uncommunicative teenager. The terrific title of the novel refers not only to a basic principle in physics and to the Challenger tragedy, but also to the unmeasurable and unknowable.

Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
By Pauline W. Chen
Knopf, 267 pp., $23.95

Doctors are drawn to medicine to save lives and are trained in complicated procedures to prolong health. Yet they frequently confront death. This paradox lies at the heart of Pauline Chen's thoughtful and soulful reflections on becoming a doctor. Death is in medical students' eyes and on their hands, clothes, hair, and nostrils as they dissect cadavers. This initial rite of passage demands that students suspend their normal physical and emotional reactions. And it is followed by a long and rigorous training that will allow them a "comfortable equilibrium . . . detached concern, secure uncertainty, and humanistic technology." There is also a hidden curriculum where "slang terms, subtle gestures, unspoken decisions, and the canon of clinical fables all feed into this value system."

Chen describes her own medical education. She recalls the benchmarks of her experience -- the reliance she had on hand-scrubbing rituals, the first patient who died under her care (literally in her hands) . She is particularly astute in recognizing that most doctors are not good at difficult conversations, that they prefer to describe and perform the hope-driven treatments that have only a slim chance of saving a patient rather than confirm that patient's fear and his or her family's dread that he or she will die. Their medical training does little to erase their natural fear and aversion to death. Acknowledging mortality is what they need to pass their final exam.

Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.