Emotional worlds away, One Day’s Perfect Weather is a catalog of damage and loss among the cognoscenti. It’s a measure of Daniel Stern’s skill that his conceit of building urbane stories on the frames of well-known poetry and music is wholly successful. The U of H professor dispatches his protagonists like stunt doubles into crises large and small. His butterscotch-smooth narrative can wear thin, but his intelligence prevails. If he took chances, he’d be damn brilliant. by Mike Shea.
