A humorous, compassionate look at some unlikely heroes

AS a fiction writer, Sara Pritchard does more with less. The 11 loosely connected stories in her second book, “Lately,” display an economy of language, illuminating the startling vicissitudes of ordinary lives. Yet her characters respond to hardship with a shrug rather than melodrama.

In “A Winter’s Tale,” the story that opens this collection, a woman named Celeste wonders why she tends to crack jokes when under duress, then concludes that she must have been born with a smart-aleck gene. She considers this a character flaw. “Why couldn’t she be serious? Even in her darkest hours, when suicide came knocking at her door in its yellowed shirt and drab, ill-fitting suit, ringing the bell like a sugar-crazed trick-or-treater, even then, feeling so desperate, something about her was so nonchalant, so flippant, so devil-be-damned. She was nearly always, it seemed, so much more alive and brave in crisis situations than in everyday life.”

Even when Pritchard’s stories drift along without much in the way of plot, her lyrical, dead-on lines stop you in your tracks: “Full moon, first snow sticking to the pavement like confectioners’ sugar on a jelly doughnut.” Elsewhere, in a story about two sisters throwing a divorce party, Pritchard writes: “Candles flicker, and across the long row of living room windows, our reflections dance, then disappear into the dark, polished woodwork.” It’s partly her attentiveness to those minute details and seemingly quotidian fleeting moments that makes this collection so impressive.

In “Late October, Early April,” a woman named Alma gives birth to a son, Jude, “a beautiful, perfect baby, except for his arms. Instead of arms, Jude had two tiny appendages, one like a flipper, the other like a frog’s leg.” Yet the focus of the story is not about a boy with birth defects but about Alma’s sister, Beryl Ann, who years later must decide whether to abort her pregnancy by a man she doesn’t love. (She is 19, a sophomore in a nursing school, and he is a draftee about to be shipped out to Vietnam. “That one time with Vinny was the only time she hadn’t used any contraception, and wouldn’t you know it, wouldn’t you know she’d end up pregnant?”)

Pritchard’s characters are oddballs, but not ridiculously so. Their quirky habits are noted as matter-of-factly as their troubles: “Maggie is pacing in my office, gnawing on a no. 2 lead pencil like it’s a miniature ear of corn,” Pritchard writes. “It’s a disgusting habit, if you ask me, like sucking on pennies, which she also does.... I’ve seen her eat paste and rubber cement, little wads of the Sunday Leader, and globs of drywall spackle. I’ve seen her stick her finger in a can of paint and lick it off like it was icing.”

Religion also plays a prominent, if sometimes dysfunctional, role in Pritchard’s stories. The narrator of “The Pink Motel,” whose Fuller Brush salesman father deserted the family when she was 6, contemplates converting to Roman Catholicism.

She longs for a “hierarchy of sins, holy days and saint’s days, fasts and feasts. And a father, too. In absentia, true, but omnipresent nonetheless, hovering above me day and night like an invisible Goodyear blimp.”

She was raised Protestant, “but we paid allegiance to no particular denomination.” They flitted from “Presbyterian to Episcopalian to Lutheran to Methodist like bees among the thistles, searching always for ... a choir and congregation that were truly appreciative of my mother’s trained voice.” They “avoided the Baptists on the grounds, I believe, that they sang what my mother considered a bastardized version of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ the hymn she used as a litmus test of a church’s musical acumen.”

Pritchard lives in West Virginia, and here and there, these stories show flashes of Southern Gothic style (Flannery O’Connor), as well as the resigned sadness found in much of Carson McCullers’ work. Yet in her subtle portrayals of disconnected relationships and empty yearnings -- often in middle-aged lives -- Pritchard also displays the grace and clarity of, say, Anne Tyler or even Alice Munro.

But the truth is, Pritchard has a marvelous style all her own. She displays compassion and off-kilter humor in equal doses. Her characters are appealing in unexpected ways, and they seem indifferent to whether they are loved or not. Quietly resilient, these unlikely heroes are smart enough to know that sentimentality is often a waste of time.

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Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of six anthologies of poetry, including “Solitude” and “Motherhood.”