Unsettled

The ten stories in this collection explore conflicts generated by personal space and property. Many involve characters occupying or navigating someone else’s turf: in “Blue Tape,” a woman illicitly inhabits her ex-husband’s apartment; in “The Pink Solution,” a house-sitter attempts to fend off trick-or-treaters and other menaces; and in “The Quantum Event,” a behavioral scientist conducts a series of covert experiments on a friend in an isolated lab. The collection’s thematic interest in space serves to generate, in turn, a set of more formal questions: How does narrative itself manage space? What do stories enable the reader to see (or not see)? How do different points of view and strategies of focalization shape the reader’s movement through the story? While the stories' unsettled spaces often entail equally unsettled minds, the narratives resist psychological solutions. The characters do not accumulate depth and dimension, but rather get emptied out and displaced onto various objects and events. If characters find themselves by the end of the stories, it is mainly through external means, by way of what they have left behind.