of a marriage.

The title story tells of a Korean War veteran who is prevailed upon to investigate a murder. “You the only thing close to the law we got,” his mother pleads, convinced that her son’s experience rounding up drunk soldiers as a member of the military police qualifies him as a detective. She tells him that Miss Agatha, the murdered man’s mother, cannot find any peace until she knows what happened to him, and the D.C. police do not bother to follow up on what they view as the routine murder of a black man. The veteran reluctantly agrees to look into the matter, putting his own plans for a move to Alaska on hold while he pokes around the victim’s neighborhood and apartment. In the end neither he nor the reader has solved the murder, but he gives the mother, poor old Miss Agatha, the most plausible answer. Counterpoint to this main story is an equally interesting backstorya structural trick that Jones uses frequently. The veteran’s mother, aunt, and her friend Agatha came to Washington years ago as young women. They were alone and hardly old enough to cope on their own, but they had little choice. They had just beaten a white man who had tried to rape Agatha, and they had to get away from Alabama before he came to or was found.

Woven through these two tales are fragments of others; the last words, in Yiddish, of a woman struck down in the street by a car; a former girlfriend whom the veteran is sure is stalking him. Holding them all together is only the veteran’s puzzlement. The way there is no resolution at the end, and the story closes with what may be a small epiphany or merely a sputter; this is vintage Jones.

“Old Boys, Old Girls” brings Caesar, a young hoodlum from Jones’s first collection’s story “The Young Lions,” into adulthood. Now a genuine thug by the world’s measure, Caesar does time in Lorton Penitentiary. He emerges with a near-paralyzed arm and no friends. He is even thinking of chancing another murder rap by raiding the resident moneylender’s safe, when he learns that an old girlfriend of his is living in the same rooming house. Both are too worn down by life to share more than cigarettes, but he visits her a few times and brings her food. Then he finds her dead. In one of the few redemptive acts of his life, he cleans her body and room. Then he goes out into the sunlight, making the only plans he can for his future life: to find the money to give her a decent burial.

“Root Worker” features a doctor whose mother nightly becomes the prey of “witches” who temporarily paralyze her. Medicine and psychiatry have not helped, and to the doctor’s chagrin, a cure comes from an old Carolina root worker.

Jones breaks most of the rules about conventional story structure. In place of plot, his stories are layered with memories, twists of time, seemingly irrelevant solid objects, and ghostly ones as well. Fantastic things happen matter-of-factly and sometimes change the course of characters’ lives. Readers new to his writing are likely to be baffled when the narrative segues to tell of an unrelated event, even within the same paragraph. The usual effect, however, is to compress the whole substance of a novel into a short story’s space. It is a dazzling accomplishment when it works well, which it usually does in this author’s hands.

If Jones ignores dictums about plot, he brings his characters to life masterfully. The flashbacks, add-on identities, and imaginings that stud his characters’ consciousness capture their inner life as no mere description could. Although his characters of all ages, genders, and statuses ring true, Jones’s very best portrayals are those of older black men, especially those who have done their best to live a respectable life. He can instantly summon up a whole generation’s habits in a deft phrase or two: “He was wearing a suit now, as was often the case with [black] men of a certain age. . . . They wore suits out into the world the way knights had worn armor; they wore suits even to baseball games and to shoeshine jobs.”

Horace Perkins’s predicament in “A Rich Man”widowed at age sixty, and then his prized 78-rpm record collection and spotless reputation shattered by the crack>using young women he takes inis both comic and tragic. Few readers will be able to resist a twinge of sympathy, though, for the old man lured into their company by his late-life lust and loneliness.

Noah Robinson (of “Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister”) is unforgettable. His grandson Adam is a victim of the crack epidemic, which took away his parents, and of the chaotic foster care system. Long after the boy’s parents have vanished, Noah and his wife Maggie have the chance to be reunited with the six-year-old and bring him up, along with his baby sister, who already lives with them. Noah is not a rich or educated man, but what he offers the terrified boypatience and grandfatherly camaraderieis priceless. Adam keeps asking when he is going home. Noah, though hurt and puzzled by this, tries to meet the boy on his own level and discover what home he is remembering. It turns out that his many past homes are all jumbled in his mind, and Noah gradually manages to get the idea across that “home” is now here, and forever. There is also an extended imagery of trees threaded through the story. Noah notes that trees, plentiful in his youth, are now dying out in many parts of Washington. In reaction, he cultivates a bonsai tree, and he regularly empties out the trash that collects in the wire frame around the tree in front of their apartment house.

Responsibility for Adam means that Maggie and Noah have to give up their own plans to travel in their retirement, but they do not hesitate. Despite the theme of “dreams denied,” in many ways this is the book’s most hopeful story.

The title All Aunt Hagar’s Children is an expression that Jones heard his mother use. It refers to the biblical character Hagar, handmaiden to the patriarch Abraham’s wife Sarah. According to legend, after conceiving a child by Abraham, Hagar was forced to flee. She became the ancestral mother of the black race. Jones’s vision of a black community, varied as it is but sharing a common heritage and moving to Washington, D.C., with some common dreams, draws on the legend’s implications. Washington’s African American population has always been a vital part of the capital’s life. With Jones’s stories, it becomes an essential part of the American literary tradition as well.