NICK AND LORRAINE WERE LOVERS

Metz probes the mysteries of love, friendship, and parenthood in this debut fiction collection.

Sometimes even the people you love can be a total mystery. That’s what a college boy learns in the title story of Metz’s collection when the girl he’s fallen in love with—his first real romance—abruptly leaves him for an older man. “I know what you love, and it isn’t me,” she tells him, a line that will haunt him as he embarks on an ill-fated mission to win her back. Such confusion abounds across these 13 stories. In “Knowing”, a grieving mother attempts to understand the “angry” suicide of her daughter. In “Everything Will Be Fine,” a divorced dad is pulled away from an impulsive hookup when one of his sons lands in the hospital, forcing him to confront his failures as a husband and father. In “No One Left Behind,” a boy tries to understand why he has to be nice to his best friend’s brother and what it has to do with his best friend’s father’s service in the war. “Objects in Motion,” one of the book’s strongest stories, follows a teenage boy as he discovers a secondary father figure in his neighbor, an ex-high school football star, and an unexpected friendship with the man’s daughter. The neighbor changes the boy’s understanding of his own father, a quiet, unathletic man from whom he has begun to drift. Metz tells these tales, many of which take place in the small towns and suburbs of southern Illinois, in unfussy yet precise prose. Here he describes a mourning mother after the death of her daughter: “She was aware of going through each day, of seeing people at work and the grocery store and in her neighborhood. She heard herself speaking, but conversations had become collections of sounds.” Metz is weakest with endings, which are often a bit too neat to resolve the many fascinating dynamics he sets in motion. Regardless, he captures something of the quiet melancholy of middle American life.

A collection of elegant and open-hearted short stories.