But even the most positive stories have an undercurrent of unease. Sometimes they’re oddly liberating, as when the annoyingly perky wife and mother in “Bad Latch” proves to have some gumption to back up her chipper proclamations. Sometimes the mistaken ideas are deeply humiliating: The discontented wife in “The World Has Many Butterflies” discovers that the man with whom she’s been sharing bitchy assessments of fellow members of their affluent Houston social set is not the soul mate she thought and has been judging her by the conventional standards she believed they both despised. Ten stories by bestselling novelist Sittenfeld ( Eligible, 2016, etc.) probe the fissures beneath the surfaces of comfortable lives.ĭonald Trump bookends the collection, as an alarming candidate in “Gender Studies” and an upset victor in “Do-Over.” His unexpected election suits the characters’ sense of the ground shifting underneath them, often due to false assumptions.
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