What is lost in momentum is gained in precisely observed frustration and disappointment. The story employs James’s standard method of toggling between present and past. One of these later stories, ‘Brush Off’, is a telling investigation into modern manners (or the lack thereof), centred on a lunchtime meeting of old friends. Though the collection spans ten years, the recent stories tend to be the strongest. Prose seemingly in rude health is soon cut off. Another problem is the book’s terse paragraph construction. Offering little relief to the reader, James’s carefully sketched creations border on caricature. The price the collection pays for its sustained look into suburban alienation is the absence of almost any kind of humour. The voices here commingle but never connect, ultimately resigned to communication in a void. This method allows for what a single narrative strand often precludes: ambiguity, uncertainty, complication. Rather than offering the reader unbroken chronological narratives, James’s stories, often within a page of starting, are halted by sudden retreats into the past or fractured by the intrusion of new voices.

The stories, even by the genre’s standards, are fragmented creations. If the short fiction of some novelists feels too constrained, James’s evocation of despair is perfectly suited to these short bursts. Her characters are frequently repressed and restrained, filled with rage that is rarely given voice. For the most part, the stories are quiet and domestic affairs. Why She Loves Him is James’s first story collection after two well-received novels. In the short stories of Wendy James and Tom Cho, we are presented with similarly brief and precise tales of two different Australian landscapes: one as small as a kitchen, the other as capacious as an arena. Never cursory, this was writing performed under haiku-like restraint.

In his Olinger and Tarbox tales, characters are assembled quickly and sent to their fate with little delay. John Updike was a master of this demanding form. The term ‘short story’ more than likely brings to mind the magazine-length sprint or the rapidly delivered epiphany. Self-evidently, the short story demands precision.

Look Who's Morphing by Tom Cho