Mating in Captivity

The cynical sides of love and lust run through this collection of sexually-charged short stories about the perils of modern couplings. The characters%E2%80%94husbands, wives, lovers, friends, and co-workers%E2%80%94wallow in the misery of self-absorption, and the pairings are layered in disappointments. Tensions explode from familiar sources of frustration: in an attempt to have a child, a husband and wife's sex life becomes routine and voided of passion; a middle-aged woman misguidedly pursues an extramarital fling with an old flame from her university days in Paris; and a fisherman who can't resist the dubious charms of the local siren capsizes his marriage in the process. Renek (Spiritland) crafts elegant prose and deftly maps these complex emotional landscapes. Although fans of relationship angst will find much to dwell on, causal readers may find these relentlessly self-absorbed Northeasterners less appealing. Surprisingly, the best of these stories, "Bring it On," has little to do with the dynamics of sex and attraction. Here Renek deftly captures the monotony of three young people working in a copy shop and how one unbalanced customer and her manuscript briefly upends their habits and forces them to ponder the gulf between authors and their audiences. "A writer never knows if the reader truly understands," one of the employees concludes, "and the reader can only guess at what the writer intended." (Mar.)