Peter Orner's "Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge" For the past 12 years, since his lauded "Esther Stories," Peter Orner has been engaged in a strange, quiet and wonderful experiment. He has written four works of fiction - two novels and two story collections - all composed of canny snippets that build with subtle accumulative power to create books autobiographical in feel, if not necessarily in fact. In all but his first novel, "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo," the books return to the same characters from startling vantage points; Orner is writing in spirals, moving restlessly out to embody imagined characters, but always returning to the Chicago and Fall River, Mass., family of his most frequent first-person narrator, a young man who is roughly his age. In each of his books, Orner's crystalline sentences and his ability to pay close and sustained attention to small moments transform the ordinary elements of each story into an even more astonishing whole. "Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge," Orner's new collection, is composed of 52 stories, most no longer than a few pages. There are many strands running through the weave of this book: one is a series featuring the above-mentioned family, another is a group of italicized first-person stories, another imagines people outside of the central character/narrator's experience, like a woman who sells television antennas in a Mexico City plaza and a Serbian woman sitting in a coffee shop. Yet another strand observes famous people: Mary Todd Lincoln, Richard J. Daley, Ted Kennedy, Geraldo Rivera and Isaac Babel, one of many writers with whom Orner is in conversation. Chekhov is another clear influence, as is the Evan S. Connell of "Mr. Bridge" and "Mrs. Bridge," novels written in the same episodic manner Orner favors. At his strongest, Orner can nail interior monologue in a way that recalls Grace Paley. Just listen to the voice of Walt Kaplan, a character who also appears in "Esther Stories" and in the novel "Love and Shame and Love": Would my head were a head of lettuce. I drove the last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the state police closed it off. The Cape Cod Canal all atempest beneath. No cars coming, no cars going. The bridge cables flapping like rubber bands. You think in certain circumstances a few thousand feet of bridge isn't a thousand miles? A writer who keeps returning to the same subjects runs a big risk. The reader can feel like an invisible observer in a room walled with mirrors, watching the author fascinated by the endless reflections of himself. Just when you think he's finished examining this interesting feature, here it is again from a different angle. When Orner returns too often to the same beat or idea, he can almost reverse the effects of his truest gift, which is the ability to take elements we've seen before - the historical characters, the suburbs, the tight-knit Jewish families, Chicago - and, by the force of his fascination, make them thrillingly strange. This talent never fails Orner; yet when he looks too often at the same loss or character or mood, he teeters on the verge of returning the strange back to the familiar. Where would we be, though, without writers who take great risks? They are the interesting ones to follow from book to book. Sometimes the risky writer stumbles in his funambulist guise, and you wonder if he's about to dive into the drink. In "Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge," Orner is especially daring with structure. Though the collection is organized into four loose sections based on what I interpret as loss, murder, longing and what remains after loss, it's difficult to understand why these stories had to appear in the same book. The leaps from historical character to internal narrative to apparent transcription make a reader a little dizzy. Most great story collections - "Jesus" Son," by Denis Johnson; "Twilight of the Superheroes," by Deborah Eisenberg; "Varieties of Disturbance," by Lydia Davis - contain stories that feel as if they must be together, through character, thematic refraction or just a barely detectable urgency. They develop subtle arguments from beginning to end. Though every story in "Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge" is excellent, incisive, moving, the collection as a whole never quite coheres: there are 52 passionate arguments being made in the 52 stories, but a person coming to Orner for the first time might feel that each story is mostly arguing with itself. Luckily, there are other ways of reading story collections than in a single linear sweep. A reader could dip into this book anywhere, go for a walk, and come back later to be moved differently. Or a reader could - and perhaps should - also read the collection as an integral part of a much greater whole, one still expanding and contracting and coiling inward, a living and breathing project that is evolving in a way that uncannily mimics memory, or life itself. Lauren Groff is the author, most recently, of the novel "Arcadia."