A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE

Stories and dialogues, realism and fabulism all sit together in this fiction collection.

A man takes his family to a neighborhood cookout in a park, where parents grill and eat, children play, teenagers lounge, and a few older people look on from some benches: “A little something for everyone, he thinks. Somehow it reminds him of that Dutch artist’s scene of peasants taking their leisure at the end of the day. Pastoral.” Of course, the man soon finds himself with a pair of police officers’ guns drawn on him. Such sharp reversals are common in this hodgepodge collection, in which the tone shifts unexpectedly within stories and between them. In one piece, a little girl sits on the family sofa attempting to work up the nerve to make a confession to her mother in the next room. But when she clears her conscience, it isn’t quite what readers anticipated. In another story, a woman decides to put together a puppet show for some children in the park only to be beaten up by the kids when they get too immersed in the performance. A series of offbeat fables gives way to a piece about a woman examining her dead mother. One tale features episodes involving ants and a grasshopper, a group of state senators and Donald Trump, and a coven of witches. Whatever the topic, Kasten’s prose is measured and understated, building inevitably to some colorful moment of outburst. Here, a woman confronts a college classmate unsympathetic to her fragrance allergy: “I staggered after the man, and halfway down the hall grabbed him by the neck of his jacket. He swung around, and I took hold of the fragrance-soaked fabric of his sturdy denim lapels. ‘Listen, you stinking cesspit, if you come to class wearing Old Spice again, I’ll have you shot.’ ” With the exception of one long (and good) story, the pieces are generally short, and their variety is a feature, not a bug. Some works are inevitably stronger than others, but the author always manages to find the human fault lines in her narratives, revealing them to readers before hurrying on to the next episode.

A multifaceted and highly enjoyable assemblage of tales in different forms.