The Long Swim

In these often exquisite if occasionally myopic stories from Svoboda (Dog on Fire), women grapple with feelings of powerlessness. In “Swordfished in Nantucket,” a woman visiting her husband’s family on the Massachusetts island yearns to be taken seriously by his brash and cavalier male cousins (when a Vietnam vet asks for a cigarette in a growling voice the narrator “associate[s] more with bears than unshaven men,” she tries not to betray the fact that she’s never been a smoker). Cold War anxiety drives the oblique “80s Lilies,” in which an American woman travels to New Zealand with her family, searching for a place safe from nuclear fallout in the event of a bomb. “Knife Block” portrays a 75-year-old woman’s contentious relationship with her mentally unstable stepson, who invites unhoused people to lounge around in the family’s home and threatens his father with a knife. “They stink,” the woman thinks of the stepson’s friends, “but one of them is less homeless than the others because he still has a phone which means he can be reached, which is all home means really.” Though Svoboda slips into stereotypes at times, for the most part, she crafts singular depictions of her characters’ inner worlds. This artful volume has its moments. (Mar.)