THE GREAT AMERICAN EVERYTHING

Families fall apart and occasionally come together in this debut collection.

Each of these 10 stories features a first-person narrator, a man or a woman, gay or straight, likely in their 20s or 30s, trying to make some tenuous connections amid the confusions of modern life. Who are they, where are they, why are they? They don’t know where their jobs are going, where their lives are going, where they belong, or with whom. And they live amid the threats of climate crisis, terrorist bombs, and an expanding chasm between the haves and have-nots. “The Birds of Basra,” the opener, is one of the best and most ambitious of the stories; it imagines a model of caregiving in which the elderly and infirm are charged for each individual task, their attendants nickel-and-diming them until they either die or their funds run out. The young narrator, a female caregiver, has a partner who is more socially aware and who tells her, “You rob elderly people.” Yes she does, but the narrator also feels something for the woman she watches. The money runs out, and the job will as well, but the story doesn’t really resolve itself. These stories rarely do—they start in the middle of something and end somewhere else in the middle, with the reader learning something more about the narrator and the others than perhaps these characters know about themselves. There is plenty of disease and death and babies, wanted or not. In “Phosphorous,” a man has something of a psychotic breakdown and risks criminal charges to procure a baby after his wife dies in childbirth. In “The Paragon of Animals,” an unanticipated pregnancy leads to complications that a married couple had assumed they would never face. The closing “Tennessee” finds the narrator’s institutionalized mother going crazier while his wife is about to give birth.

Social conscience meets psychological despair in stories that show plenty of literary command.