YOU WOULD HAVE TOLD ME NOT TO

Seven sharp stories that dwell on relationships both good and bad but never fully resolved.

In “That First Time,” the first entry in Coake’s bittersweet story collection, Bob, a middle-aged man in a dying marriage, learns that Annabeth, a high school fling, has died. She didn’t mean that much to him, but Bob was the first person Annabeth had sex with. Her friend Vicky, who delivers this news, seems oddly on edge about Bob’s relative lack of emotional investment, but the twist ending is both crushing and shows just how differently our pasts can shape us. Coake, who won the PEN/Bingham Prize for his debut collection, We’re in Trouble (2005), has developed a deceptively simple style that nicely serves his setups, which turn on simple tensions that grow increasingly complex. In “Waste,” a day laborer is joined by a new employee who looks remarkably like him, sparking questions about whether they’re father and son and about the fate of the young man’s mother. Lisa, the protagonist of “This Will Come As a Surprise to You,” learns that her abusive ex-husband is planning to remarry and is at odds about what she should say (if anything) to his new fiancee. The conflict is predictable in “Getaway,” about a wayward young man working at a summer resort who’s torn between his budding relationship with a girl and his admiration of the Don Juan who brings a new beauty to a deluxe cabin every weekend. But with room to play with, Coake can make simple conflicts sing: The closing novella, “Big Guy,” concerns an obese man (336 pounds at his heaviest) whose weight-loss plan opens new frontiers for him physically and romantically but leaves unresolved his anxiety over sex, accomplishment, and how to address past romantic wounds. Fitness can make us better, Coake suggests, but what if it just makes us better at cultivating resentment and spite?

Clean, unfussy storytelling in service of messy lives.