Simple stories about complicated relationships

It's a name that evokes the everyday and the colloquial. "Jean Thompson" could be the nice woman who lives a few doors away and is locally renowned for the homemade brownies she bestows every fall on trick-or-treaters.

In fact, it's the All-American moniker that denotes one of our most astute diagnosticians of contemporary experience, conflict, unhappiness, and regret. A National Book Award nomination a few years back for her third short story collection should have earned this canny Midwesterner a prominent place on the national literary map. With "Throw Like a Girl," the onus is now on us, her neighbors and beneficiaries. If we don't know who she is yet, we need to get our imaginations out and read more widely.

Interestingly enough, Thompson's first story collection, "The Gasoline Wars" (1979), appeared as part of a group effort: four such volumes by as many authors, published by the University of Illinois Press. The collection "Little Face" (1984) and the NBA-nominated one "Who Do You Love" (1999) followed, as did four increasingly well-received novels, including "Wide Blue Yonder" (2001) and "City Boy" (2004).

Her latest gathering of 12 gritty, firmly unsentimental tales continues to mine the territory over which Canada's Alice Munro would seem to hold North American rights: the subject announced by the title of Munro's acclaimed "Lives of Girls and Women."

The younger targets of Thompson's gimlet eye include "The Brats," a high school pair consisting of an angry, asocial girl (Iris) and her overweight sociopathic classmate (Rico). In their sick braggadocio, we sense the kind of latent violence that erupts all too frequently in schools these days (though in this duo's case, the harm they cause is almost farcically accidental).

Their inchoate fantasies of afflicting the adult world are more troublingly realized by Jessie of "The Five Senses." Bored with her middle-class family's unglamorous ways, she runs off to Florida with a vicious drifter ("R.B.") who exploits and abuses the clueless teen's rejection of suburban values and embrace of "this new one . . . [which] was like the ocean. It took you places without your knowing." Precisely.

Unsettled adult relationships are analyzed with trenchant, dispassionate clarity in a good story ("Lost") about an ingenuous salesgirl's forlorn fixation on a sullen biker still obsessed with the girl who had dumped him; and a mediocre one about a rejected woman seeking to reinvent herself in Alaska, though still compelled to make nuisance calls to the married lover who no longer wants her ("The Inside Passage").

Emotions are credibly mixed in the feisty title story, whose narrator ruefully measures her own failed relationships with men against the scattered energies of her former best friend, a wild child unable to control or focus her own innate survival skills. Women who do try to take charge of their own fates include "The Woman Taken in Adultery," a middle-aged mom who achieves both enlightenment and liberation when she takes an art appreciation class -- and a lover; and the young wife who resolves to emulate her husband's escape from marriage and parenthood by following him into Army service abroad ("It Would Not Make Me Tremble to See Ten Thousand Fall").

Generations collide in the story of an aging Californian's protective and harmful relationships with her unstable younger sister's adult children ("Hunger"), and in the droll comedy of "The Family Barcus," an embittered daughter's recounting of how her irrationally optimistic, pipe-dreaming father has simultaneously stunted his kids' growth and given them skeptical, stubborn individual strengths. It's one of Thompson's finest stories.

Another is "Pie of the Month," which depicts the unequal friendship of two Iowa women who provide their small community with the service denoted by the story's title. To take-charge Mrs. Pulliam, it's an expression of her respectability and local fame. To widowed Mrs. Colley (the viewpoint character), baking is both a comfort and a constant in a world without her late husband, where ignorant armies clash daily, and traditional values seem to have become irrelevant. The controlled emotion of this story is almost worthy of Flannery O'Connor -- until a flat, needlessly declarative final page leaves a final sour taste.

Thompson excels at portraying characters too easily betrayed by those they hoped to love and be loved by, too unobservant or naive to notice the thunderbolts poised to strike them down. She's unsurpassed at exploring the defensive psyches of people who know they don't fit in. And she can encapsulate a life's worth of disillusionment in a single stinging, hurtling sentence: "You're supposed to say the years flew by without your noticing but that's not true; I felt their shape and weight at every step."

Her plainspoken stories reveal a keen understanding of the relationships people form with familiar places and common objects as well as with other people. It's as if she's saying we're all simple creatures, despite a tendency to complicate everything we touch. Love and devotion and perseverance don't always work, it's true. But what do we have that's any better? Her heartfelt, heartachy stories dramatize the quandary memorably, while never forgetting to remind us that we have to keep on truckin', and trying.

Bruce Allen writes about fiction for numerous publications. He lives in Kittery, Maine.