We’ve Already Gone This Far

Dacey’s debut story collection chronicles the economically and emotionally struggling residents of a Massachusetts town, Wequaquet. Despite the exhausted, drained characters, these tales of neighborly conflicts, professional and personal malaise, and family tragedy are marked by a certain buoyancy. In describing these frustrated lives, Dacey can be as funny as he is compassionate. A retired football coach overzealously guards his gazanias (“Friend of Mine”); a married high school teacher is drawn to an old flame who has become a sexual healer (“Frieda, Years Later”); an alcoholic chaperones his unstable young son on a date (“To Feel Again the Kind of Love That Hurts Something Terrible”); a woman undergoes extensive plastic surgery (“Mutatis Mutandis”). The stories are less lurid and violent than those in Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff, another promising debut collection about small-town American life, though darkness does creep in: “Bad things will happen. They have to. They’re good for you, anyway,” a father tells his son. There are some hiccups, including “Ballad,” an underwhelming, unpunctuated internal monologue, and “Incoming Mail,” which consists of a mother’s letters to her son fighting in Iraq and strains to capture an unhip parental voice. But taken as a whole, Dacey’s breakout collection shows that small towns can still yield big fictional rewards. (Feb.)