Robinson’s characters are often blindsided by life-or-death decisions, and the humor of his stories tends to give way to something deeper and creepier. In “The Diver,” for instance, a husband offers a local $50 to untangle his yacht’s propeller, and realizes how menacing the man is only when the guy’s on his boat, leering at his wife and asking to hold his baby.
Ian McEwan might have written a story like “The Diver” 25 years ago, and ended it with a sea of blood. But Robinson is a more humane writer than that–less interested in shocks, more interested in how narrowly, and frequently, we escape tragedy. A few stories in “Officer Friendly” are subpar–and too often Robinson hooks up a basically decent main character with somebody delusional just to see what happens. But rough patches are the price of admission for anybody’s first book. Robinson writes ruefully about the gulf between fathers and sons (in “Ride,” a trucker celebrates his kid’s birthday by dragging him into a lame scheme to steal a painting) and between friends (in “Puckheads,” two rowdy high-school hockey players are forced to act in a production of “Oliver!”). You wouldn’t want to live in Point Allison, but Robinson makes it hard to leave.
