By Charles Fidlar

“When once invited to join a police lineup, I didn’t visualize the scurrilous group of dysfunctional miscreants that I would be alongside.”

I know you might guess Mickey Spillane wrote this teaser, but in fact it’s the opening sentence of “The Lineup,” one of John Funchion’s stories from his new collection, “My Father’s Dented Cans and Other Stories.”

Those of us who spy Norfolk’s Funchion on his well-worn ambulations through our bucolic town will immediately recognize him: upon approaching the bottom of the Battell Stoeckel hill, he swivels and walks the rise backward! Just so, this latest lineup of thirty-six vignettes glances backward over an examined life well traveled.

A reader might expect his remembrance of things past to be organized in a linear chronology. Do not be put off by the scattered sequence of these brilliant mosaics, each carved, illuminated and polished in the tradition of the best storytellers. Rather, organization is around an anthropology of emotion. As the stories move among darkness, gentle humor, wonder, sex and transcendence, “Dented Cans” may be opened anywhere and enjoyed.

As with the best writers, Funchion’s voice is strong and consistent. Not many people say what they think, and if the quality of authenticity is the hallmark of a fine writer, Funchion excels.

The first story, “The Ball,” begins: “Someone once suggested that the dawn of knowledge is usually a false dawn.” With a line worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, we are thrust into the terror of a radioactive nasal probe’s failure to burn open Funchion’s sinus. Resorting to hammer and chisel, Dr. O’Brien shapes the nose, with the “thunk, thunk” of breaking cartilage. Hindered by the doctor’s smoke and phlegm, Funchion struggles to explain: “Yez dongctah I wsz stupid. No dongctah I waz not rezponzible.”

The title story, “My Father’s Dented Cans,” reveals survival lessons from the fringe taught by the mercurial, Dickensian head of a bulging household—definitely not cheaper by the dozen. His father’s alcoholism, like the fatal crack in the House of Usher, will ultimately wreak havoc on the family: “my emotionally crippled, very bright father, a slave to the demons of alcohol.”

A vivid report, “The Brook 1,” introduces a seminal event: the family’s first-born, three-year-old Ned drowns in a nearby spring-swollen brook. The following story, “The Brook 2,” transforms and reenvisions the brook from a place of tragedy into a place of youthful, exuberant joy. Funchion seems to say, along with Whitman, this soiled world is washed again and again.

How did Funchion surmount this inauspicious beginning to earn a B.A. in English and an M.A. in the psychology of reading, both from Temple University, and fulfill a distinguished Connecticut teaching career? While the story “My Jobs” presents a virtual tutorial in the serpentine trajectory of success, “Test Tubes” and the “Little Milk Truck” provide a clue: “It is the universal challenge of survival that often fires up the human spirit to levels thought impossible . . . and I endure.”

More than one who endures, Funchion is a keen observer who finds astonishing beauty in the commonplace. A winning literary strategy is to begin a story with a mundane statement of fact that, upon further examination, unravels, expands into a fascinating discourse of details. “The Belly Flop” opens unremarkably: “A short while ago, my Uncle Mike, who was ninety-one years old, died.” You’ll love the ending—without giving too much away, Mike’s final exaltation is “This is great!”

An appreciation of the sensual courses through the collection. In “Arbor Sphere” Funchion muses, “My ball became a gloriously gleaming, tactile creation for all who saw and touched it. Its smooth, undulating surface became an almost erotic pleasure to caress.”

Perhaps as a way to revisit and assuage little Ned’s drowning, swimming plays a major role in Funchion’s life. His prose flows in long, undulating, strong strokes in the trifecta of “Swiming,” “Floating” and “A Swimmer’s Defiance of Time.” As I read “Swimming” I could not imagine a better answer to the question, Why swim? “I felt the release and euphoria of becoming one with the water, without fear of an air-less world . . . like a bright exultation in the evening.”

Auguste Rodin’s marble sculpture of Francesca and Paolo, “The Kiss,” becomes a key unlocking John’s memory of his first kiss. Innocent, unsure, an awkward youth of sixteen, he finds himself on a beach with a beautiful Greek girl. “How and why I landed on that beach—is a mystery to me.” Rodin’s two sculptured figures play in counterpoint to John, enveloped in amorous feeling: “[I] kept staring at this beautiful girl, the daughter of an undertaker.”

Locked in time, Paolo and Francesca will never kiss, and John will never again kiss the Greek girl, but you should hasten to acquire “My Father’s Dented Cans,” a delightful read.

You can catch John reading selections from his book at the Norfolk Library, Sunday, March 11, at 3 p.m.

Photo, top, of author John Funchion by Bruce Frisch.