Asking for love and other stories

With the publication of only two works of fiction, a first novel called Summer Light and a story collection, A Glimpse of Scarlet, Roxana Robinson has established a reputation as a chronicler of the carefully hidden realities behind the serene surface of old-guard WASP family life. She has been called "John Cheever's heir apparent" by The New York Times Book Review and compared with Henry James and Edith Wharton by Time. She writes about the same sorts of people - the old-moneyed families of Manhattan, Connecticut, Long Island, and Maine, the inhabitants of summer homes and town houses, boarding schools and private clubs - but Robinson's characters are as contemporary as today's teenagers, a group she depicts with particularly unnerving accuracy. Her style is concise and unsparingly honest, but tempered by sympathy and a basic understanding of human nature that is at times profound. . In this second collection of her short fiction, the author returns to the world she knows so well and shows us men and women whose lives are in various stages of disarray, or repair. Divorce and remarriage have altered their landscapes, and they struggle to achieve order with a new set of rules. Stories like "The Nightmare" and "Family Restaurant" explore the minefields of stepparenting and portray the confused struggles - sometimes silent, sometimes not - of the ultimate victims of divorce, the children. Marriage itself, and especially its tendency to change, is explored in stories like "Slipping Away" and "Do Not Stand Here. And stories like "White Boys in Their Teens" and "Leaving Home" examine the experiences of those who step outside this privileged, comfortable world, often to gain a new perspective on their lives.