A collection of short stories about the many roles that music plays in people’s lives.

A varied and affecting collection of brief, tuneful works.

In this novel, a shiftless young man in Ohio sets out to find his legendarily irresponsible cousin and make peace with his own directionless life.

Marty “Cuz” Haff is infamous for his foolhardiness, “crudeness and poor judgment,” and grotesque lack of discipline. He’s a strange man who seems casually comfortable with long bouts of homelessness and claims to have a bobcat’s heart, a declaration he refuses to explain. One summer, just before his senior year of high school, Terry Haff lands a job working with his cousin Cuz at a landscape supply business and develops a genuine affection for him. Terry even comes to admire an uncompromising integrity that somehow seems to form the core of Cuz’s commitment to dissipation. Terry is a timid and unambitious teen, frantically drawn to but equally terrified of the opposite sex, and Cuz becomes a kind of loving mentor. Terry’s parents, Ed and Gladys, view Cuz through a permanent lens of suspicion yet tolerate him nonetheless, if only barely. But an accident changes everything—while at work with Cuz, Terry’s arm is brutally damaged by a soil screener, a mishap that results in “an above elbow disarticulation,” essentially a partial amputation. Ed wants Cuz held criminally responsible, but Gladys settles for his permanent banishment from the state of Ohio—he accepts his exile and moves to Arizona. Terry doesn’t hold Cuz responsible and mourns his loss, an attachment endearingly (and comically) captured by Bachmann. When Cuz disappears—he apparently sets his Airstream aflame and goes off to die quietly in the Grand Canyon—Terry becomes obsessed with rescuing him while his family remains utterly indifferent.

The author displays a talent for the dual depiction of comedy and tragedy—consider this account of Terry’s partial amputation, one that doesn’t even earn him the glow of heroism: “His wound is bereft of honor. It was a mistake born of imbalance, an ill-advised and uncoordinated heel slip in inclement weather.” Readers will be uncertain whether they should laugh or cry at Terry’s predicament, something that could be said of the entire novel, as silly as it is affecting. Bachmann eventually paints a fuller picture of Cuz, who is much more than a hapless clown. He grew up under the despotism of a brutal father, a “long-dead brute” notorious for his “cartoonish cruelty,” an upbringing that clearly left its mark. Cuz can be astonishingly thoughtful, and his peripatetic life seems philosophically principled. As he relates to Terry, “Heraclitus says everything is on fire. It took me about forty years to learn what that meant. Everything is in flux. Everything flows, nothing stands still. It’s all deteriorating right in front of your eyes, even all of us. Especially us. Our cells are deteriorating as we speak. We are all on fire.” There is no obvious lesson to be drawn from this free-wheeling story—Bachmann is far too subtle to bore readers with a condescendingly didactic sermon. Rather, he simply tells a riveting and humorous story, one that prompts reflection without imposing an imperious stamp on it.

An unpretentiously moving tale, both funny and slyly intelligent.

Social bonds strain and snap in Bachmann’s latest collection of literary short fiction.

Just because a relationship is longstanding doesn’t mean it’s stable. That’s a lesson learned over and over by the characters in the author’s tales that address such topics as crumbling romances, simmering dissatisfactions, rock-bottom moments, and long-kept secrets. In “An Expensive Surgery,” a woman whose cat requires a hysterectomy is forced to ask her sister for the money—the same sister who she regards as having ruined her life: “How should she summarize the relationship? She might just say that the unprovoked cruelties Veronica consistently put on her when they were younger left invisible but certain marks, enough to send her in desperate search of therapy as an adult, therapy she could not afford for more than a few months at a time.” In “Southern Moon Incident,” an old man discovers an unexpected person stripping at the local gentlemen’s club. A family is forced to take in a loner teenage cousin for a week in “Red Smear on Traveling Gray,” even though something about him makes their skin crawl. (Needless to say, their attempts to include him in social activities goes horribly awry.) In another typical story, “Arbitrary Persistence,” a man, Bill, tries to prevent his newly wheelchair-bound brother, Arthur, from accompanying him and a friend to the local bar, not because he finds Arthur to be a nuisance, but because his sibling has been banned from the bar for life for making lewd comments to one of the bartenders. Arthur, of course, refuses to listen and shows up at the bar anyway. Chaos ensues. The drama turns not on Arthur’s disability, but on longstanding aspects of his personality that drive Bill to his breaking point.

Bachmann’s prose is direct and inflected with a certain grit, as in “The Condition of the Cabin,” about a family gathering for Thanksgiving following the death of its patriarch: “Paul had just inadvertently dragged the past six heavy months into the dining room when he told the one about their father catching those teenagers growing marijuana plants on a patch of their land, how Dad forced those punks at pitchfork-point to eat those plants raw from roots to stem to leaves.” The stories also capture the claustrophobia of interpersonal relationships, in which love and hate sit side-by-side and destruction is often as compelling an outcome as reconciliation. Bachmann is also deft at sketching characters with just a few lines of detail; a man in one story has “a balky lower back, among the other ires of middle age,” which forces him “to hang up his sneakers from the over-forty weekly pickup game at Saint Sebastian’s.” The author excels at concocting situations that reveal the fault lines in a relationship, sometimes bringing an unstable status quo to collapse over the course of a few paragraphs. Fans of the dirty-realism tradition of American short fiction are likely to enjoy these punchy offerings.

An accomplished set of tales that poke at sore spots of love and resentment.