FEMALE TROUBLE

Uneven but deeply affecting, Nelson's fourth story collection (she's also written three novels) maps the dimensions of the human—usually female—heart, both in love and in grief. Troubles, as the title suggests, abound: affairs, infertility, mental illness, death. But so does humor (a vacation home where a family gathers "to remind themselves how badly they got along" and a kind of hard-won, essential wisdom ("all a person could do was the right thing," a grieving widow muses, as she reconciles herself to a simultaneously "merciful" and "treacherous" future.) In the title story, a well-meaning but emotionally stunted man attempting to understand the three women in his life—the matronly woman he lives with, the pregnant former girlfriend who moves in and the suicidal mental patient he takes for a lover—comes to the conclusion that their wants and needs are so complicated that it's time he left town. However poorly that may reflect on him, readers will be tempted to nod in sympathy: Nelson's women in particular tend toward desperation and upheaval. And they have appetites—if life were a jukebox, they want the volume turned up loud. Yet their desires are basic: to love and to be loved, to have children, to protect them. The notion of caregiving—its successes and failures—plays an important role in these stories: in "Loose Cannon" and "Ball Peen," brothers, however unequipped to handle their own lives, try to nurture struggling sisters; in "Palisades," a woman adrift in a vacation town becomes the confidante to a husband and a wife, who tell her the kinds of things they can't tell each other. Cheerful uplifting moments may be rare, but this collection's tales of men and women navigating life in all its messiness demonstrate the prowess of a truly accomplished writer. (Apr.)