Mathias B. Freese is an ambitious writer. Nothing wrong with that. All individuals with a felicity for a good turn of phrase are. Only, Mr Freese knows just how good he is and makes sure the awareness informs each sentence that he frames to define the contours of his prose in his short story compilation Down to a Sunless Sea. The bad news is, such indulgence scalds a reader just beginning to enjoy a Freese piece.

Mathias B. Freese is also very American. Reading him one knows what an “American experience”, as it were, is. Human yes, humane yes. But essentially evocatively, unapologetically American. And that is what makes his stories momentarily teeter on the edge of the unforgettable before rolling back to the valley of the also-read. Is that because “we carry with us our own cemeteries” (Unanswerable )? This story about what a child sees as a father’s betrayal and his subsequent “emotional disembowelment” could have been a heart-wrenching chronicle of a child, like many, seeking parental approval and how he was let down. But Mr Freese’s sociological build-up and commentary does little to help the emotions along.

A child’s disenchantment is a motif that appears again and again in his short stories. The first story in the compilation, the eponymous Down to a Sunless Sea , tells the story of cumulative betrayal well and hard but stops short of making the eyes mist over. True, a good short story should not be qualified by its tear-jerking abilities but a good, old fashioned tale of parental betrayal should also be able to inspire an equally good, old fashioned sense of betrayal ~ not specific to any child or its expectations.

Herbie passes the muster more than most, though.

But the best story in the compilation has to be I’ll make it, I think . Here is a story which cannot be browbeaten by Mr Freese’s sense of desolation, a story where hope persists for the severely disabled protagonist. What infuses the story with that sense of unforgettableness, so to say, is the protagonist’s acceptance of his irrevocable shortcomings and his resolve to confront life despite them. A story of defiant courage, a story of defiant hope.