Stories that are jeweled windows into characters

Yesterday's Weather
By Anne Enright
Grove, 308 pp., $24

Writers who divide their creative time between novels and short stories have long debated the difference between them. Up to now, I've favored the idea that the short story writer knows her destination from the outset, while the novelist sets out to explore unknown terrain. But Anne Enright turns that distinction on its head. The stories in "Yesterday's Weather" offer up surprise after surprise. They're quite short, as short stories go, yet they contain whole worlds inhabited by complex, contradictory characters.

"Yesterday's Weather," Enright's seventh book, is her second collection of short stories. Her most recent novel, "The Gathering," won the Man Booker prize, and she is also the author of a nonfiction book, "Making Babies."

The stories here, many of which first appeared in publications like The New Yorker and Harper's, were written over a 20-year period. Their arrangement in reverse chronological order offers a fascinating slide show of one very gifted writer's development.

Enright belongs to a younger generation of Commonwealth writers - among them Kate Atkinson, Rachel Cusk, Helen Dunmore, Tessa Hadley, A.L. Kennedy, Andrea Levy, and Zadie Smith - who depict the ordinary lives of contemporary women and (sometimes) men in sensuous, energetic, in-your-face prose that retains the intelligence and gleam of the British literary tradition. The narrator of "Historical Letters," one of the gems in Enright's collection, puts it this way: "Despite the fact that I was born in nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-two, I go around the house mouthing words like they were new, like the whole problem of words was as fresh as Paris." Enright's words make ordinary, daily moments new: a man "setting [his baby] down on its stomach to swim its way across the carpet" ; a young male hairdresser's "remarkable, sexual blue eyes" ; the "slug trails" a baby with a summer cold has laid across his mother's T-shirt; a gas station attendant "with the weeping snout of his gun, that drips a silent humiliation on the cement." Enright's images distill moments of feeling in a way that fuses their ordinariness and their intensity. Here is pregnancy: "These days, my skin smells of vegetable soup. I mean quite nice soup, but soup - you know?" Here is new motherhood: "Hazel felt like she kept losing this baby, and getting someone new. She thought that she would fall in love with the baby if only it would stay still, just for a minute." Here is caregiving: "Catherine thought about bees in a swarm; the cancer being smoked out of her mother's body to settle in the space under her arm, a drowsy mass. If she could just scoop them up as a beekeeper might, and carry them away, and leave not a single one behind." And here is sex: "She said that sex was an act of the imagination, but he said it was a speech act. He felt that he was blurting something into her. And afterwards, he told her about his father's death." Enright's women have a lot to say about sex - which one of them, the narrator of "Switzerland" sees as "just a shortcut." For Catherine, whose mother is dying, "when he stroked her, it felt as though her skin was coming off under his hands." For the narrator of "Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalimar" (my favorite story in this collection), who finds she's in love with a schizophrenic, sex is "sweet as rainwater." For the wayward handbag salesgirl in "(She Owns) Every Thing," it is "a singular activity, it seemed to scatter and gather her at the same time."

Although Enright is intensely interested in her characters, they inhabit these stories almost as avatars. Many of the stories, including some of the strongest - "Until the Girl Died," "Here's to Love," "Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalimar," "The House of the Architect's Love Story," "The Portable Virgin" - are narrated by their heroines. These voices, stiletto-direct in their honesty and generous in their reach, read as successive takes on a single sensibility at different times and in different situations. It's not that Enright's characters are interchangeable; rather, their individuality goes so deep it hits bedrock. The title story offers such a moment: "He looked at her and smiled so sweetly that Hazel knew he had just witnessed the scene on the lawn. Also that he forgave her. And this was so unbearable to her - that a complete stranger should be able to forgive her most intimate dealings in this way - that Hazel swung past the tiny old man as she went inside, nearly pushing him against the glass."

Its richness makes "Yesterday's Weather" a book to be read over time, story by story, allowing each its own claim on your eye and ear. The 31 stories form a sort of Advent calendar, tiny jeweled windows that open onto their own deep worlds, let us savor them for a moment in all their unresolved, ambiguous beauty, then shut again.

Ann Harleman is the author of two story collections, "Happiness" and "Thoreau's Laundry," and two novels, "Bitter Lake" and "The Year She Disappeared."