Many of these evocations of female dysfunction are extremely well done. I suspect I would have enjoyed them more in isolation; en masse, their skewed realities become same-ish. The joy of short stories lies in their potential for variety and surprise, for unexpected shifts between stories as well as within them. At the local level, Enright offers relentlessly surprising twists: undermining conventional expectations, indeed, is her preferred method of narration, from the very first sentence of the first story:

I had sex with this guy one Saturday night before Christmas and gave him my number and, something about him, I should have know he would be the type to call.

This is enjoyable; but after a bit one begins to expect that one’s expectations will be undermined.

This cumulative narrative tone is uncomfortably close to that of the heroine in Enright’s Booker-prizewinning novel, The Gathering, which makes these short stories feel a little too like leavings or an overspill, from the novel or from a breakdown. Leftovers and ghosts are often the stuff of Enright’s fiction; but they make the air in this bell-jar stale.

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