LIST OF ALL POSSIBLE DESIRES

A dazzling cycle of stories revolving around a complicated, fascinating, talented young badass.

You have to hand it to Rainey Royal, a character who will not be denied. She came into the world a friend of the protagonist in Landis’ 2009 debut, Normal People Don’t Live Like This. By 2014, she’d gotten herself a whole book, titled Rainey Royal, of course. Now she’s the point around which a volume billed as the third installment in the Rainey Royal Cycle revolves. The stories here span the years from 1947 to 1987 and add depth to characters and events introduced in the earlier books, though it’s not strictly necessary to have read them. The first story, "La Nounou," peeks into the childhood of Rainey’s father, Howard, during a summer he spent in Paris in the care of a reckless nanny. “Howard Royal, eleven and two months, sat on his parents’ bed and watched his nounou at his mother’s dressing table draw a ruby lipstick over her opulent lower lip. His own mouth hung open, a chalice of joy and shock.” This way of using words almost like gems is Landis’ trademark. The title story is next, starring Rainey’s aunt Laurette Barbanel back in 1959, when she’s the 23-year-old minder of a stroke victim whose blossoming bruises indicate something very bad about her husband; unfortunately, the only word left in the woman’s brain is “Wunderbar!” We see Rainey for the first time in the third story, “Embouchure,” set in 1969, and get to know Howard as the extremely louche jazz musician he grew up to be. In subsequent stories, we encounter Rainey as a talented but self-destructive artist with a broken moral compass. Subsequent stories follow the long trail of abuse Rainey endures as a preteen as well as the complexities of her relationship with her mother, who abandons her to join an ashram. In “Mr. Apology,” a story set in 1980 about a (real-world) art project in which anyone can leave a message apologizing for something they’ve done, Rainey says she isn’t sorry for a gunpoint robbery she and her best friend pulled off as teens; she definitely hasn’t aged out of her badness. Her current project is making tapestries festooned with tiny objects she’s stolen. That Rainey.

Other people write with words; Landis seems to write with mercury.