IT TAKES A WORRIED MAN

Novelist Daugherty (The Boy Orator, 1999, etc.) returns with a collection of eight stories about mostly unhappy denizens of “Mama Houston.”

In “Comfort Me With Apples,” a folklorist named George, whose wife and parents have died in a freak traffic accident, becomes entwined in a family of illegal immigrants until the mother snaps and drowns her children. In “Tombstone Television,” George reappears to befriend a homeless man living at the cemetery where George has buried his family. In both stories, as in much of the collection, a middle-class white man confronts his own unhappiness while observing the authentically down-and-out. The narrator of “A Worried Song After Work” is a labor lawyer on a blind date with a perky blond. When he drags her along to a meeting of disgruntled workers, he assumes that she is too materialistic to appreciate the issues he cares about, but she, like most of Daugherty’s women, turns out to be a tough cookie. Romance blossoms even as hope for improving the workers’ condition fades. Even in stories that do not directly concern Houston’s underclass, the city comes across as a corrupt and depressing place peopled by Daugherty’s lonely, vaguely ineffective protagonists. Henry, of “Henry’s Women,” is dumped by his girlfriend because he doesn’t notice she’s had an abortion only to fall in love with a pregnant woman whose husband has left her. In “The Leavings of Panic,” the narrator recalls his mother’s impatience with his father’s passivity as he contemplates stealing a good friend’s wife. While the protagonist of “Bliss” appears on his way to artistic success away from Houston, the story is set in the murky zone of regret in the weeks of packing up before he leaves town—and his wife and child. In the final piece, “Burying the Blues,” Hugh, a junior-college history professor obsessed with black blues, gradually recognizes that truly knowing another culture, or even another individual, is impossible.

Sometimes heavy-handed, always heavy-hearted.