It’s all relative

A short story at its best is a miracle of compression. It is an almost alchemical reaction among language, character and plot that distills the essence of a tale from all that is extraneous. Readers often shy away from short fiction, feeling that they might not experience the pleasure of the longer novelistic adventure. The natural inclination to put off the endings of good things makes them suspicious of a form that insists on wrapping things up rather quickly. But when a story manages that acrobatic feat of using relatively few words and images to reveal a fully imagined world, we are as entranced as when we enter the narrative complexity of a single painting. In the most successful story, an end is a beginning too, the story closes as our wonder blooms.

In “Up at a Villa,” the opening story of Helen Simpson’s witty, wise and stirring new collection, “In the Driver’s Seat,” a quartet of teenagers spy on a disgruntled married couple and their restless infant as the family attempts to relax by a hotel pool. The youths, awash in budding sexuality, are horrified by the spectacle of adult life in all its unromantic glory. Simpson tells us of how “the woman muttered something they couldn’t hear, and shrugged herself out of her bikini top. They gasped and gaped in fascination as she uncovered her huge brown nipples on breasts like wheels of Camembert.” This image, like so many in Simpson’s stories, is unexpected and so precisely the right blend of humor and emotional exactitude that it exposes layers of meaning. One cannot help but imagine the body’s helpless abandonment to age and the myriad disappointments of grown-up life. With marvelous, diverting language and sharply drawn characters, Simpson conjures the predicament of growing older, of unmet dreams and of youthful arrogance and naivete, all the while letting us know that life is essentially a humorous proposition, even at its most devastating or banal.

Each of Simpson’s stories turns on her characters’ recognition of the limitations of the human situation. Most, but not all, are women in middle age, confronting choices and knowing that they will be simultaneously let down and buoyed up by rude reality. In “Early One Morning,” Zoe drives her child and his mates to school. As she maneuvers through traffic, she contemplates caring for her children, the sacrifices of self that are inevitable, disheartening and necessary. Simpson writes that Zoe “stared out from the static car at the line of people waiting in the rain at the bus stop, and studied their faces. Time sinks into flesh (she mused), gradually sinks it. A look of distant bruising arrives, and also for some reason asymmetry. One eye sits higher than the other and the mouth looks crooked. We start to resemble cartoons or caricatures of ourselves. On cold days like today the effect can be quite trollish.” The story’s power creeps up on the reader as Simpson juxtaposes Zoe’s frank and funny assessment of her life with the vibrant, inane chatter of the children in the back seat.

The female central character in “The Door” enlists a handyman to repair her front door, which was damaged during a robbery. In the course of what seems to be the ordinary business of home repair, we learn that the woman is grieving a newly dead lover and that her awkward attempts to make conversation with the taciturn repairman represent her arduous first steps toward healing. Simpson writes about the “inevitable difficulty in discovering ourselves to others; the cliches and blindness and inadvertent misrepresentations.” With lines like these, Simpson charges her deceptively simple tales with universes of feeling.

In the collection’s most breathtaking story, a 43-year-old science teacher takes her daily walk around a park and contemplates a surprise pregnancy. Her mind drifts randomly, from thoughts of a recently deceased friend to the problems of memory loss, middle age, the conundrum of time and the circularity of life. “The thing about a circular walk,” she ponders, “is that you end up where you started -- except, of course, you don’t.” The same could be said of these deft and entrancing tales, which bring us back to ourselves with portraits of lives we recognize as they prod us to reach beyond what we think we know.

What makes Simpson’s stories sing is that she seems tacitly to acknowledge the lie embedded in the tired notion of a story’s “resolution.” Characters go through situations, sometimes life-changing, even life-threatening, yet they don’t necessarily improve or discover truth. They don’t, despite popular psychology’s insistence on it, “grow and change.” They just move a little to the left or the right, and in doing so, their view of life alters ever so slightly and ours widens immeasurably.

Alex Mindt, in his debut collection, “Male of the Species,” works hard to achieve his stories’ meanings, often burdening his characters with dramatic moments of understanding; in doing so, he risks robbing readers of a sense of discovery. Mindt writes in a wide array of voices. An elderly Mexican man sets out on a journey to prevent his daughter from marrying another woman. A young Southern boy tricks his father into loving him. A Texas woman’s science-teacher husband stands up to the town’s football-dominated ethos when he fails the star player, making it impossible for the boy to play and the team to win.

Mindt moves with skill and ease from one voice to the next. His ear is finely tuned, and his situations are ripe with dramatic potential. In “An Artist at Work,” an African American teenage boy, stranded in a small, largely white town, begins to act out, creating provocative performance-art pieces, much to his father’s embarrassment and consternation. When the father responds boldly and uncharacteristically, we anticipate that the story might surprise us, that it will take us to an unexpected place. But Mindt doesn’t allow his characters to follow through on their impulses. Instead, at the moment when this story seems poised to take off, he pulls up short, and the final moment is too cleanly resolved: We sense the author working hard to make the drama conform to a preconceived notion of denouement. One wishes Mindt would loosen his grip on his narratives and allow his stories to carry his characters and us away.

That same problem occurs in the title story, in which the Texas science teacher takes a stand against his community, and his wife’s adultery, beating his chest, as it were, in the only way he knows how.

It is a wonderful setup, but Mindt ends his story with a barely believable gesture -- the star player experiences some off-stage transcendence and forgives his teacher. The town, and his wife, follow suit. Given the complexity of the conflicts Mindt sets in motion, this resolution seems too neat, and the story, at the final moment, flattens.

A number of the stories avoid this authorial heavy-handedness and signal that Mindt is a writer worth watching. In “Sabor a Mi,” the elderly Mexican man, determined to reach his daughter and stop her before she makes the mistake of following her heart, is picked up by another, younger man who has left his wife and children, having failed to live up to his duties as a father. The relationship between the two men, one reticent, the other voluble to a fault, is charming, and Mindt wisely sits back and allows the characters to lead the story forward. The ending is fresh and powerful: We suck in a breath of wonder along with the old man.

In the excellent “Stories of the Hunt,” Mindt reworks the iconic father-son hunter story in a way that surprises and illuminates. When the young boy recognizes that his father is not the heroic hunter he thought him to be, he understands “the irrevocable nature of stories, how they turn necessarily by their own design, formed by circumstance and longing.” It is a riveting and moving suggestion, one that, in the best of these stories, this talented author has confidence enough to heed.