Impressive cast of characters in 'Other People'

(cover design by darren hagger)

There are several reasons to buy "The Book of Other People," an anthology of character-driven stories assembled by novelist Zadie Smith, and they aren't all literary.

First, its table of contents is close to a Who's Who of who's hip in literary circles - heavy on the darlings of The Believer and Granta. Shelve the volume, and in 20 years you'll have a fascinating time capsule of writers who were hot in 2008. Second, this is a charity effort, akin to the 2000 anthology of first-person stories "Speaking With the Angel," edited by Nick Hornby. Sales of this book benefit 826 NYC, Dave Eggers's nonprofit group dedicated to improving children's writing skills.

Third, as with any A-list group, half the fun is wondering about those who aren't here. Elder statesmen of letters are conspicuously absent. So are a few writers you'd expect to be included: Melissa Bank, Jeffrey Eugenides, Nicole Krauss. Were they asked? Did they miss the deadline? Finally, not to be slighted, are the stories themselves. Although uneven in quality, this is a great way to get a taste of an author before committing to a whole book.

The conceit behind Smith's volume is character. Each of the 23 stories is named after a made-up character. These range from the somber to the crazed and include, in addition to people, Eggers's sweet mountain monsters and George Saunders's puppy.

There are several standouts. In Edwidge Danticat's quietly resonant "Lélé," the narrator, who's followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps as justice of the peace in a Haitian river town, feels torn between the life he's always known and forging new paths. When his older sister, finally pregnant after 20 years of marriage but with a doomed baby, leaves her husband and moves back home, he worries about the river, which threatens to flood their house. But most of all he worries about his sister's attempt to retreat into a childish past.

In Colm Tóibín's "Donal Webster," an Irishman teaching in Texas recalls his mother's death in Dublin six years earlier, addressing the rued ex-lover he last saw at her funeral. The story is a gorgeous meditation on the "need and hollowness" and "sad echoes and dim feelings" that remain after attachments are severed.

David Mitchell and Hari Kunzru both write about unhinged women utterly lacking in self-perspective. Mitchell's "Judith Castle" is an initially funny, ultimately sad portrait of a desperately overbearing "tragic menopausal hag" who thinks she's snagged a soulmate on the Internet.

Hari Kunzru's turbulent Magda Mandela is a hoot, "a terrifying mash-up of the Venus of Willendorf and a Victoria's Secret catalogue" who's moved in with a widower 40 years her senior. Dressed in a lime-green thong, she wrestles - loudly, from her doorstep in the middle of the night, for all her East London neighbors to hear - with "the great question of her life: old man or young man?"

Several stories, including Jonathan Lethem's "Perkus Tooth," effectively distill the pleasures of the writers' longer fiction, providing a worthy introduction to their work. Perkus is a classic Lethem eccentric, an obsessive film buff and collector with a "tendency to veer into ellipsis." The narrator, a former child star in limbo while his astronaut girlfriend orbits the earth, feels comfortingly tethered when pulled into Perkus's "world inside the world."

Many of the pieces - including ZZ Packer's "Gideon," A.M. Homes's "Cindy Stubenstock," and Andrew Sean Greer's "Newton Wicks" - are little more than sketches, too slight to be called stories. Smith and A.L. Kennedy err on the other side, trying to pack too much into the short form.

A collection wouldn't be truly hip without some graphic work. Hornby and Posy Simmonds keep things light with a tongue-in-cheek portrait of "a writing life" told in author photos and jacket bios. Chris Ware's visual bildungsroman, reduced to fit into 9-by-6-inch paperback format, is a vision test that readers older than the book's contributors are bound to fail.

Some of the writers let loose and have fun, including Jonathan Safran Foer, who presents a Jewish grandmother's monologue, part whine, part nurture, part shtick. Others get stuck. In "The Monster," an aimless fragment, Toby Litt pretty much admits defeat with his last line: "The monster had no story, unless being a monster is story enough."

As the more successful stories demonstrate, character - even weird character - is not enough. Characters need to do, think, or feel something, bringing us, and perhaps them, a moment of heightened awareness, the enlightenment or epiphany that is the reason we read.

Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for newspapers.