Certain American States: Stories

A Granta Best of Young American Novelists whose Nobody Is Ever Missing was an NYPL Young Lions finalist, Lacey delivers an accomplished collection featuring characters suffering a sense of dislocation, as if they've just been pushed off a cliff. A man worried that his former wife will portray him badly in her writing stumbles when he confronts her; a woman who's moved to New York from Texas cannot regain her traction when her beloved brother dies and further fails to connect with her mother, her discomfort reflected in her inability to understand what a homeless man is trying to say. A sense of helpless solitude permeates the stories, as when a woman agrees to cat-sit for a man with whom she has little in common. Even the cat doesn't like her, and cats, dogs, and other animals show up throughout to highlight human failings. Lacey is a fluid writer whose stylistic choices expertly reflect her characters' state of mind; the endless sentences articulated by the man fearing his ex-wife's retaliation bespeak a sort of breathless anxiety; elsewhere, parentheses within parentheses embody the constant asides of someone who cannot speak her mind.