THE NATURE OF LONGING by Alyce...

THE NATURE OF LONGING by Alyce Miller (Norton: $10; 229 pp.). The bleak stories in this Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection depict people in troubled relationships attempting to connect with each other. The well-intentioned but ineffectual hero of “Summer in Detroit” typifies their situation: “Franklin kept moving faster, ducking and dodging, trusting that those thin cables holding up his life wouldn’t finally snap and shackle him.” In “Tommy,” a woman attends the funeral of an old friend who died of the complications of AIDS and realizes that his family has lived in denial for many years. In subtle, understated prose, Miller limns a web of quiet despair as her characters seek to find their way through a morass of emotional, racial and sexual questions.