Sharing lives yet remaining strangers

Bret LOTT has a terrific capacity for writing about common folk and pulling readers into the emotional worlds of those who, perhaps like ourselves, lead lives of quiet desperation.

In his Oprah Book Club novel, “Jewel,” for example, he tells the story of a Mississippi mother who gives birth to a child with Down syndrome and how Jewel learns to see the blessings her daughter brings. His most recent novel, “A Song I Knew by Heart,” recounts the biblical story of Naomi and Ruth reset in small-town Massachusetts and coastal South Carolina. Overcome with grief, a woman and her daughter-in-law, widows both, learn to rely on and find solace in each other as they walk through the pain of mourning. Lott’s down-to-earth characters drive his fiction and allow readers passage to the more poignant aspects of the human condition.

What works well in novels, though, is not always so easy to pull off in short stories. Lott’s newest collection, “The Difference Between Women and Men,” is a bit thorny for readers to enter, since the tales end before giving us the time and space we need to fully relate to the characters. More problematic, though, are the moments of magical realism Lott introduces.

The opening story, “Family,” tells of a husband and wife arguing so passionately that they lose track of their school-age children, Jennifer and Scott. After a lengthy search, during which it is feared the children may have drowned in the family’s swimming pool, the father finds them, shrunk to miniature size, “no bigger than Jennifer’s Barbies, Scott’s G.I. Joes,” living in a cooler in the garage. They are no longer children but adults. Scott is clicking a miniature remote control and trawling through stations on his tiny television. Jennifer is watching her own miniature screen, exercising to a workout video. Not only are the children no longer who they once were, but it turns out the parents have transformed as well. “Listen, Bill, we have to talk,” the wife says near the end of the tale. “My name’s not Bill,” he responds. “It’s Linda, right?” the husband asks his wife. “Nope,” comes the answer.

In “Somebody Else,” a couple on the verge of breaking up looks longingly at another couple across a parking lot, clearly in love. “That’s us,” the woman says to the man, “if we were somebody else.” And then suddenly, they are the other couple, the somebody elses.

While these stories speak to the unknowability of the other -- mates, children, parents, other loved ones -- the break from realism undercuts Lott’s most powerful tool, that of being able to construct an everyday world in which what he describes is genuine.

Thankfully, many of the stories don’t rely on these supernatural twists but work to tell us about the grief of daily life.

The strongest story in this collection capitalizes on Lott’s strength: good, old-fashioned storytelling. “The Train, the Lake, the Bridge” opens with an unnamed narrator setting the scene: “We save this story for only the darkest winter nights, the thickest snows, when we know we cannot dig out for a few days and so are guaranteed one another’s company.” As the Depression-era tale unfolds, readers learn about one fateful night when a terrible storm hits and a train plunges into an ice-clogged lake as the bridge it’s riding on gives way, carrying those aboard to their frozen graves.

In the title story, a woman has an epiphany right after her husband tries to explain to her the difference between women and men. “She looked at him, and it occurred to her that this man, her husband of twenty-seven years, was a strange and loud man, stranger and louder than any man she’d ever known.” These are stories of infidelities and of the inevitable disappointments of married life, of couples breaking up and of children turning their backs on parents. In this patchy collection that is sprinkled with moments of illumination, Lott asks us to consider how well, really, we know those people who make up our lives.

Bernadette Murphy is a regular contributor to the Book Review and the author of “Zen and the Art of Knitting,” a work of narrative nonfiction.