In this overstuffed collection from Booker Prize–winner Enright (The Gathering
), the gems are overshadowed by the sheer number of stories (there are 31). Enright's talent lies in her ability to tweak an ordinary situation and create something that is at once unique and universal: two wives coming to different conclusions about their husbands' infidelities in “Until the Girl Died” and “The Portable Virgin,” an examination of elevator and pregnancy etiquette in “Shaft” or the permutations of sexual desire in “Revenge.” Other standouts such as “Little Sister” and “Felix” resonate because of their tight focus. In the former, the narrator pieces together her dead sister's life and realizes “It was all just bits. I really wanted it to add up to something, but it didn't.” In “Felix,” Enright riffs on Lolita
and creates an endearing and repulsive middle-aged woman narrator who has an affair with a neighborhood boy. But too often Enright's characters—more often than not female, first-person narrators—bleed into one another until their stories become jumbled in the reader's mind, as another unhappy wife or mother laments her situation. (Sept.)
