The Emerald Light inthe Air

The stories in Antrim's engaging new collection have been published over the last 15 years in The New Yorker. Many are set in Manhattan, but they are not stereotypically brittle New York stories. Antrim's city dwellers are perpetual renters of fifth-floor walk-ups with careers they cannot sustain as lawyers or painters or actors. They drink more than they should (one story is called "Another Manhattan"), fall easily into infidelities, have a taste for fine clothing they cannot afford, and check themselves in and out of the city's psychiatric wards. At the outset of a story called "He Knew," a husband feels that "he might soon be coming out of the Dread." He leads his chronically panicked wife on their ritual walk along Madison Avenue, stopping first at Bergdorf Goodman and then working their way "north through the East Sixties and Seventies, into the low Eighties, touring the expensive shops." The whole story happens as they walk, worry, and lose each other along the way, and we worry right along with them.