Worship of the Common Heart: New and Selected Stories by Patricia Henley. MacMurray & Beck: 358 pages. $14.50.

Patricia Henley challenges the very American idea that we can escape the past. Not “you can’t go home again,” but “you must go home again.”

In this collection of stories, some of which are 20 years old, Henley’s characters are drawn to home, as if it were a magnet powerful enough to pull them by all the iron in their blood. And even if home isn’t somewhere they’d necessarily want to be, there they go, circling back to the hive, no matter how rotted the honey is, no matter how unencumbered and spontaneous they imagine themselves to be.

The first story in the collection, “Sun Damage,” begins with the words “Jack Ransom died on the road.” Jack’s daughter, Meg Ransom, having spent some of her own life on the road, leaves Santa Fe for Indiana, where she must find her mother and reluctantly reunite with the family of her childhood. After an initially awkward meeting with her brother (“It was the first time they’d stood on the same ground in a long time”), Meg finds her mother. “Don’t be afraid of me,” her mother whispers to her. But she is—how can she not be--with her teenage pain as obvious on her face as sun damage, brought on by the sensory memories of place.

Henley’s characters almost never feel safe. In “Aces,” Katherine, the main character, notes that “The holidays all seem like rituals made for other people, people who have some refuge in the world, some margin of safety, who’ve never seen the inside of a welfare office or the lust in the eyes of an arresting officer.” Indeed, most of the families in this collection of stories are fragmented, even the marginally successful ones are formed together from pieces of other families, like desperate people huddling together for warmth.

Henley’s backdrops are unfamiliar landscapes dotted with accidental children, accidental parents, accidental meetings, and struggles to connect masked as fights. In the title story, “Worship of the Common Heart,” a nun, Stephanie, goes on holiday to France with her ebullient, rebellious sister, Grace. She misses her spiritual family and finds herself not only in a place where the language is strange to her, but the company as well. When Stephanie at last consents to being transformed by, well, Grace, she becomes moved to paint, a practice she has long neglected.

Likewise, in “Aces,” Katharine contemplates how she came to “run out of aces,” and we find her in a Montana phone booth on a cold day, calling her mother in Mexico for money: “I want to say, we are marooned on a desert island, there is no fresh water, there are no. . .ships.” Katharine’s landscape has been slowly transforming, until she barely recognizes how she has become “locked in my life like a child in a closet.”

Most of Henley’s stories are awfully painful, told in her low and somber voice, and are sometimes an unfair exchange for the little reward we get. We see ourselves and our feeble connections to other humans re-played in every possible scenario.

The title story is drawn from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Sincere conversation is worship of the common heart.” Henley’s last book, a novel, “Hummingbird House,” was accused of “preaching”; however, in “Worship of the Common Heart,” Henley asks nothing of the reader. She shows how we drift apart, but are nevertheless drawn back (one might even be reminded of the last line of “The Great Gatsby”: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”). And that is the sadness of both books; there is no assurance that our small re-connections will bring everything we have desired; they may never fulfill us.

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.