THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, APT. 3W

An elegant if somewhat mannered collection of nine stories, mostly set within the confines of a single apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

West 89th Street between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue is one of those pleasant New York residential blocks made all the more pleasant by being off the beaten track of tourists and day-trippers. Built as an exclusive enclave for the well-to-do, however, the Upper West Side had become somewhat down at the heels and vaguely disreputable during the period (the 1970s and ’80s) of most of these tales. “Musée des Beaux Arts,” for example, offer a resident’s recollections of a demented proctologist who lived upstairs and lost his son in a freak accident (the boy made a pair of wings and, from the rooftop, tried to imitate Icarus). “Bachelor Party” describes the perverse love affair that a Jewish graduate student at Columbia carries on with the daughter of his faculty adviser (an erstwhile Nazi). In “Wakefield, 7e,” several schoolboys become obsessed with a ghostlike tenant who moves in across the hall from one of them, while the narrator of “The Inventor of Love” is a melancholy account of two gay men who adopt a boy from a troubled family but find themselves unable to cope with the pressures of parenthood. The title story is by far the longest and strangest: Borrowing from Fitzgerald’s story of a boy who was born old and grew younger, it creates a history of the strange young man in the apartment upstairs who entered the world in 1912 when he sprang from his mother’s womb as an elderly, bearded Jew and dashed his assimilationist father’s hopes of passing himself off as a Christian.

A careful portrait of a very small world: likely to appeal to New Yorkers and New York-ophiles but not-so-likely to travel well.