Short chronicles of anguished lives in ordinary times

Lynne Sharon Schwartz made her novelistic debut in 1980 with “Rough Strife,” which was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award.

In her five subsequent novels, she continued to explore the fruitful terrain of angst-ridden life in New York City, most recently with “In the Family Way: An Urban Comedy.”

“Referred Pain” is both the title and title piece of her most recent book, containing a dozen short stories. The longest is the title story, a powerful account of a man whose life is suddenly turned upside-down by a nightmarish series of dental problems that he can’t help comparing with the agonies experienced by his father in a German concentration camp and his mother in the siege of Leningrad during World War II.

The shortest, “The Word,” is barely a story: It’s the writer’s lament over forgetting a key word that was to have served as a catalyst for a story that now will never be written.

Schwartz’s subjects range from the domestic to the slightly fantastic: “The Trip to Halawa Valley” is a portrait of a middle-aged divorced couple who have come to Hawaii to attend their son’s wedding; “The Stone Master” is a kind of parable set in a mysterious town whose inhabitants are blessed at birth with special gems unique to each of them.

One could say that such variety demonstrates the author’s versatility, and to some extent it does. But one also gets the feeling that the author is casting about in search of a subject, not finding one that truly engages her, yet proceeding to write anyway because she is, after all, a professional writer determined to have the exercise.

A prime example of this can be found in “Hostages to Fortune,” a lifeless little cameo of a married couple who are caught up in an elaborate game about the imaginary offspring they’ve invented. Somewhat more successful is “Twisted Tales,” a set of five parables involving a woman with a fanatical hatred of clutter, a man who doesn’t want to sleep, a couple planning a party, a man who can’t resist looking in mirrors, and a woman who feels uncomfortable speaking her native tongue.

Writing a good parable, however, is not as easy as it looks: In this case, the first two and last two succeed, though one would be hard-pressed to say they triumph, while the middle one is a flat reworking of a tired cliche about party giving.

Schwartz experiments with literary form in “Intrusions,” but what remains in the reader’s mind is not the characters or the story but a sense of a writer dutifully pushing herself (and us) through unnecessary hoops that undermine and diminish the stories.

More in her dominant mode is “By a Dimming Light,” about a writer losing his eyesight. But again there’s that sense of merely going through the motions: The characters are dull and poorly drawn, and the plot unintentionally anticlimactic.

One gets a glimpse of Schwartz’s real strengths in “Sightings of Loretta.” The protagonist is Bennett, “a widower in his mid-fifties. An awkward age. Too young for the slow fade, but on the late side to contemplate a fresh start.... “

Throughout his life, he has always felt a strong connection -- distant, sporadic, yet oddly enduring -- to his childhood friend Loretta, whom he first met when they both were 5 years old. Loretta is as wild and adventurous as Bennett is sensible and reliable.

As Bennett observes her going through all the bizarre yet predictable changes of the times -- from ‘60s activist to street person to business editor of a fashion magazine -- her underlying emptiness becomes clear.

The most impressive and sustained achievement of this volume is the title story. The premise -- a man who sees his painful and complicated dental problems in the context of his parents’ horrendous wartime sufferings -- could easily prove little more than a stagy, contrived literary stratagem.

But as Schwartz develops it, vividly presenting the plight of her protagonist, 32-year-old Richard Koslowski, it is not only utterly convincing but also very moving.

Equally compelling and in some ways even stronger is the short but marvelously intense piece that opens this collection: “Heat.”

The narrator is a woman who all through her married life has nurtured an unspoken love for an older man (also married) who has been her husband’s mentor at work.

Any expression of this feeling, let alone an affair, has always struck her as out of the question. It lives only in her imagination as a possibility, and now, as he ages and sickens, even the possibility has gone. Describing her situation, the woman’s voice has the ring of unvarnished truth and an emotional accuracy that is quite astonishing.

Although three stories out of 12 may not sound promising, these three are superb. Three seems a small quantity, but their quality redeems the entire collection.