UNSUNG HEROES OF AMERICAN INDUSTRY

On the heels of his first novel (Goats, 2001), Poirier returns with a second story collection (after Naked Pueblo, 1999) centered, as the title implies, on offbeat entrepreneurs and their descendants.

In “Buttons,” the docent at a small-town museum depicting the history of the Badde family’s business tells visitors about Zilo Badde IV, a nerdy geek with a large sexual appetite who competes with twin Tommy for their grandfather’s affection. The brothers create a brief supermarket sensation with F’neggs, prepackaged eggs, but ultimately Zilo IV fails in both business and love. “A Note on the Type” also features an unpleasant young protagonist: Simon lives with his socially ostracized maiden aunt to save money, but it becomes apparent that he is as much of a misfit as she is. In “Gators,” narrator Vaughn’s obsession with Durina, a teenaged girl he tutors, lies just on the safe side of erotic. Durina’s mother sells alligator skins to shoe designers, and Durina plans to go to New York to try her hand at designing. Vaughn dreams of helping her and is crushed when she doesn’t need him. “Pageantry” adds little to our understanding of the beauty contest industry. A young girl pretends she participates only to please her disfigured mother, but we know better. Finest of the five stories in this thin volume is the beautiful, deeply sad “Worms.” Here, Poirier allows its central character to show humanity within his eccentricity. Raised by an aunt after a freak car accident killed his immediate family, Billy Hair is a simple country boy. He meets his future wife Dora, a reporter, when she interviews him about his worm farm, produced by “a wonderful accident” when he flooded the manure pasture. Billy and Dora, a Vassar-educated WASP, make a wildly improbable yet charming couple. But after their child accidentally drowns, their marriage collapses.

When Poirier drops the cleverness, he can delve powerfully into characters dangerously out of touch with themselves.