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Three novellas and two short stories quietly dramatize the outward manifestations of inner, emotional struggles.

In the short story “Giselle’s Tears,” the finest in Eron’s brief collection of fiction, Bart, the narrator, is a high school wrestler. He is largely neglected by his two sisters: Rachel, the popular one blessed with both brains and beauty, and Giselle, not similarly endowed by genetic fortune but always ready to grab the spotlight with her penchant for emotional fireworks. While Bart is lost in the shuffle, he forges his own drama when a pretty cheerleader touches his face: “But if some men date their sexual practice from the first girl they kissed, I date mine from the evening Marian Leigh Anberg touched my face.” In a casually informal, confidential style, the author sensitively captures the significance of that transformative moment for Bart, one that would follow him years later. In the novella The Chimera in the Plaster, Kal Norbert, an unspectacular college dropout and the “butt of the cosmic joke,” begins an improbable sexual affair with Calla Dakos, a promiscuous woman who is both receptive and indifferent to his advances. Kal is compelled to reflect on what might be either her secret power or weakness and reevaluate what he considers the “Kal Norbert Type.” All of the offerings are delicately thoughtful, though they can meander too long without focus. In addition, the author seems to incline in the direction of a kind of moral didacticism—the novella Misguided Missiles, the most comic of the pieces, chronicles the attempt by emotionally beleaguered private detective Bart Coldecker to find some meaning in his life by becoming a professional wrestler. While the tale is a genuinely funny one and impressively inventive, it concludes with a lucidity that seems more facile than edifying. Eron’s assemblage of fiction is brimming with promise, but here that promise is only inconsistently realized.

A meditative but uneven collection of tales about unfulfilled protagonists.