As fresh as love in its beginnings

In a book-length narrative, an author gets one chance at a first sentence. Among the delights of “Love Stories in This Town,” Amanda Eyre Ward’s first collection of short fiction (it follows three well-received novels), is that she gets 12.

“I first heard about Cipro at the potluck,” begins the first story in the book.

“It’s a crappy coincidence that on the day James asks for my hand in marriage, there’s a masturbator in the library,” announces the second.

“I had heard about the rib, of course, but did not expect it to be at the Smiths’ Christmas party.”

“They told us the baby was dead, and two days later we were on a plane to Texas.”

“A woman had drowned in the lake, but that did not make it less picturesque.”

“Raul was talking to me about the Hamlet product.”

And perhaps my favorite: “She thought the baby shower would be canceled due to the beheading, but she was wrong.”

If I were reading this review instead of writing it, those first sentences might be enough. They are filled with humor, intelligence and foreboding; they have freshness and frisson; they allude to cultural and personal moments I care about; they have a clean, seemingly artless delivery.

These are speakers I want to get to know.

The characters in Ward’s stories feel like my friends; often, they feel like me. They are women conducting their ordinary lives in the wake of Sept. 11, amid the dot-com boom, in love and out, preoccupied by terrorism and house-hunting, by their husband’s jobs and their father’s girlfriends, by the difficulties of having children and the conundrum of what to do with them.

They’ve moved a lot, and they live all over the place. The “town” of the book’s title is a mapful: Austin, Texas; Houston; Butte, Mont.; Savannah, Ga.; and Bloomington, Ind.; a corporate compound in Saudi Arabia; a cabin at Messalonskee Lake, Maine; a little house in Ouray, Colo.; a home hair salon in Rye, N.Y.

Although each place is carefully evoked, the effect is less that of a jouncy whistle-stop tour than a reminder of the Jon Kabat-Zinn line, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

Wherever you go, there’s Nails of America and “The Blair Witch Project” and “Pimp My Ride.” There are therapists and glasses of wine, phone calls from your mother and notes from your boss. There are reasons to cry and reasons to crack a joke, and often these reasons are one and the same.

Ward addresses the issue of setting at the end of the book, where a reader’s guide features an insightful Q & A.

As a beginning writer, she says, she tried too hard to make details of place and local color tell the reader things that could be conveyed only by the character’s thoughts. Now, instead of filling her settings with portent and metaphor, she relies on her characters.

We first see Lola -- the protagonist of all the stories in the second half of the book -- when she attends her ex-boyfriend’s wedding to Miss Montana in a church in Missoula. Five stories later, we’ve followed her around the world and back to Austin, Texas, where she’s married with two kids.

Lola’s story is not about the physical journey but about the passage she makes from a jilted 21-year-old whose world is drenched in irony to a 38-year-old woman drinking in the full pleasure of her family. The death of a neighbor’s son’s in Iraq and the romantic vagaries of her difficult dad provide depth and counterpoint as she counts her blessings.

Elsewhere in the Q & A, Ward notes that she has learned to rely on honesty instead of shock value in developing her stories. I’m not sure that’s completely true: Just look at those first sentences.

But like the thrift stores, coffee shops and country clubs her characters frequent, shocks are a part of life -- as unexpected and ordinary as a rib on the mantelpiece. They are part of every love story in every town, and Ward doesn’t forget that for a single line.

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Winik is the author, most recently, of “The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.”