BOOK REVIEW / SHORT STORIES : Visionary Glimpses of Lost Love and Unexpected Connections : LIVING TO BE A HUNDRED: Stories by Robert Boswell; Alfred A. Knopf $20, 187 pages

In the short story “The Products of Love,” the narrator attempts to decipher the curious history of a woman named Paula, with whom he has fallen in love despite her marriage to Eugene, also a friend.

He queries Paula and Eugene, separately and together, and eventually comes up with enough material to reconstruct her story. “It came out in pieces,” the narrator writes, “like a child’s elaborate toy. It’s taken concentration, and some guesswork, to assemble the parts.” But he has done the job--and discovered that he was part of Paula’s tale, perhaps even its punch line.

“The Products of Love” is not the best story in this exceptional second collection by Robert Boswell, author of the novels “Crooked Hearts” and “Mystery Ride,” but it’s representative of the book’s themes--lost love, mysterious pasts, missed and unexpected connections.

Most of the stories are romantic, but in the visionary rather than the amorous sense. Few readers would be willing to trade places with Boswell’s characters: the shopkeeper in “The Earth’s Crown,” whose wife becomes intermittently demented following the death of their infant daughter; the boy in “Glissando,” who learns about scamming from his father, about sex from his father’s mistress; the woman in “Grief,” who hates her dead daughter’s boyfriend, Scott, because she needs someone to blame for the girl’s untimely death. Boswell’s characters are people pushed close to, and sometimes beyond, their limits, to the point that they comprehend things that otherwise would have eluded them.

Some stories in “Living to Be a Hundred” make you think of Raymond Carver, the bright star in the minimalist writing firmament who now seems headed for eclipse. And it’s writers like Boswell who will perform the overshadowing, because his stories contain a richness that the minimalists, thinking richness misleading and untrue to life, deliberately avoid.

The principal construction workers in this book’s title story, for example, aren’t drunks and ne’er-do-wells: The narrator is fully aware that his dream of being an archeologist hasn’t been sold out so much as “siphoned off,” while his partner, Harvis, can articulate the exact moment in his youth that he gave up purse-snatching. Lernic is the story’s one stereotypical laborer--a blowhard asking for trouble, which he gets from the usually peaceable Harvis in the story’s climactic scene.

Boswell is strongly attracted to petty criminals and blue-collar workers, lowlifes and laborers, people who haven’t gotten many breaks in life. But his range is broader than that: “Rain” deals with two women who fall in love in the course of searching for a missing child; “The Good Man” with an alcoholic reporter’s downward spiral; “Salt Commons” with a Jim Thompson-esque kidnaping and its unanticipated aftermath.

Whatever a story’s ostensible subject, though, Boswell approaches it with uncommon sympathy, giving his characters the benefit of the doubt they never seem to get in life. The would-be killer in “Salt Commons” turns out to be quite funny, unlike her victim, the mournful, middle-aged Paul; the teacher in “Imagining Spaniards” appears to be going crazy, but Boswell humanizes him with a seriocomic scene in which a young nurse confesses, while examining his private parts, that he was her favorite instructor in high school.

No, you wouldn’t want to be Scott or Harvis or Paul, but you’re glad to know more about them, to see the roads not taken and better appreciate the fellow travelers on intersecting avenues ahead.