THE ACCEPTANCES

A linked collection of literary short stories investigates the tales hidden behind the walls of the nondescript houses lining a suburban neighborhood.

There is a strange anonymity to residential streets. Houses may be tidy or in need of repair, but other than these surface clues, there is little to give away the sorts of tragedies that might be unfolding inside of them. The college-age children of the immigrant family in the yellow two-bedroom spend their evenings cleaning the house to perfection while their mother compulsively watches stories about a refugee crisis on the news. The white three-bedroom serves as a makeshift motel where addicts can exchange drugs and sex after paying $8 for two hours. In the four-bedroom, a husband and wife dance around the old, terrible secret at the center of their marriage: “Every morning I wake up and it seems as if Jordan has forgiven me for what I did, though I cannot find the words to ask him directly. I spend all day in a quiet house wondering if it could ever be true that he would forgive me.” Each of the nine vignettes offers a new perspective on the varied and proximate lives lived in contemporary America. Prioleau’s prose is sharp and often lyrical, constructing complex psychological portraits for his narrators and their family members: “To a betrayer, an act of betrayal is typically an extended series of actions, like building a flimsy house. But this opportunity came in a single moment. Not a long, turgid series of couplets, an untranslatable epic poem. Just a moment.” Sometimes the book can feel a bit overwritten, particularly when it presents two or three of these bedroom philosophers in a row, but it also allows the author to craft passages of specificity and insight. This is a short collection at just over 100 pages, and only about half the stories really work—some feel exploitative; some simply don’t have enough of a narrative arc—but the ones where everything comes together are quite powerful. This won’t be a book for everyone, but it fits well into the long American tradition of myopic perspectives on the claustrophobia and hypocrisy of the suburbs.

Uneven tales with moments of brilliance and surprise.