NORTH OF ORDINARY

A clutch of wry coming-of-age tales, the first in 20 years from the veteran Gardiner.

The 10 well-turned stories in this collection usually feature narrators looking back on awkward but meaningful moments in their youth. The narrator of “Tree Men” is a failed academic who comes into himself as an assistant for a tree service. In the title story, a man recalls an ill-advised flirtation with a hard-to-read classmate at a Christian college. In “Virgin Summer,” a young man’s student-exchange trip to France offers some historical and social enlightenment. “Freak Corner” looks back to 1953, as the narrator explores the history of his deaf sister, a transgender neighbor, and the neighborhood bullies who tormented them both. Gardiner’s narrators are writing from a position of maturity, and some stories feature more grown-up types: “The Man From Trenton” centers on a semi-successful writer and a noisy conflict he had with a man on an Amtrak quiet car, while in “Familiars,” two couples who’ve taken vacations together for 17 years find their friendship beginning to fray. But even in those cases, Gardiner is interested in his protagonists’ past youthful foibles and how they shaped the flawed adults they became. Gardiner began publishing in the early 1970s in publications like the New Yorker, and his prose sometimes has an overly mannered, slightly fusty feel. One man, fearing death, “wondered if he was getting the scythe man’s signal,” and a plot point about a viral blog post in “Familiars” feels untenable. But at his best, he has a nuanced sense of characterization and a knack for writing gracefully about stress without undercutting the tension. That talent is strongest in “Freak Corner,” where the narrator’s sister’s misunderstood deafness and embrace of sign language slyly reveals everyone’s failures to better understand themselves.

Foursquare but often affecting studies in domestic anxiety.