SMALL IN REAL LIFE

A debut short story collection set mostly in Southern California.

These nine stories focus on desire and betrayal and how people cope with the consequences. Many of the stories are set in Los Angeles, a city whose allure and harshness seem to have a withering effect on the characters’ ability to empathize. Yet Sather takes great care to avoid mocking their folly. They make terrible choices, young and old, and the stories are juicy plotwise but never saccharine. Whether it’s a teenager trying to blackmail a parent or a deadbeat musician throwing away a big chance, Sather unearths touching levels of pain behind the desperation. She also writes about illness very well, including a character with Lou Gehrig’s disease and a young woman facing an early death from cancer. These stories offset others about a paparazzo in rehab, a fatal home invasion, and a teenage girl ditching summer camp. The varied plots and themes give the book surprising force, and Sather writes with the confidence and verve of a seasoned author. In “God’s Work,” an older judge goes on his first date since the death of his son. In a hotel that night he recalls his son pitching a baseball, feeling “stunned by such fragility,” how, as the boy played that day, “the ball carried something he didn’t want to happen, something he worked against and couldn’t stop from coming anyway.” There’s also humor and wit, as in “Venice,” in which a teenage girl says of her mother, “Her hair in a ponytail but her face a touch jowly, she looked like a competent babysitter who had overstayed their childhoods.” But for all the characters’ bravado or callousness, Sather sends them toward a reckoning and lets us make judgments at our own risk.

A strong, versatile collection as thought-provoking as it is entertaining.