[Below, McCaffery discusses the strengths of Robison's stories in Believe Them.]

Certain reviewer catch phrases have become so closely associated with Mary Robison's writing that her work now rather resembles one of those boats at anchor whose surfaces have become indistinguishable under a mass of barnacles. And since it is the highly particularized surface features of her work that make Ms. Robison's fiction so distinct, the distorting effect of these critical buzzwords—"dispassionate voice," "stripped-down delivery," "deadpan" and, of course, the m-word ("minimalism")—has been especially acute, just as it has been in the cases of the equally distinctive authors with whom Ms. Robison has frequently been compared (Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie and Frederick Barthelme).

In fact, what is striking about the 11 stories that make up Believe Them—Ms. Robison's third story collection and first in five years—is not their similarities (to one another or to works by other writers) but their variety of voices and texture, and the subtle range of emotional effects that Ms. Robison is able to create through her exquisitely controlled presentation of details. Several of these stories retain Ms. Robison's familiar focus on the lives of disaffected, upwardly mobile men and women who are shown in moments of quiet desperation; she conjures up this world with remarkable economy and precision. We instantly know these people by the clothes they wear (Nike running shoes), the cars they drive (Saabs, Alfa Romeos), their topics of casual conversation (John Mitchell, Mary Steenburgen, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Kurt Schwitters), even their names (Jay, Shane, Bridie, Jonathan, Lolly).

On the other hand, the effectiveness of several of the most memorable stories here results less from Ms. Robison's eye for the telling realistic detail than from her fascination with the grotesque and darkly comic, her characterizations of quirky people possessing odd tics of speech and behavior—in short, her intuitive feel for the surrealistic dimensions of American life that lie barely concealed under the ordinary. For example, the collection's opening story, "Seizing Control," presents Hazel, a retarded child who has never been awake when the television wasn't on. Left suddenly unattended one night when Dad follows Mom to the hospital delivery room, Hazel and her brothers and sisters "seize control" of the television, family car, telephone, liquor cabinet and all the other emblems of adult life they've been dying to try out for themselves. "For Real" is narrated by Boffo, a "girl clown" who runs old, bad movies on Channel 22's "Midday Matinee" and is in the process of deciding not to marry Dieter, a West German youth whose overly meticulous hairstyle and failure ever to get the in-joke reference to Charlton Heston or Claude Rains mark him as a dullard. In "Trying," we witness an eerily suspended moment of confrontation between a freckle-faced member of an all-girl band and her monstrously oversized homeroom teacher, Sister Elspeth, who suffers from giantism.

The longest and funniest piece in the collection, "Again, Again, Again," displays the same instincts for farcical domestic comedy and vicious (but somehow good-natured) social satire that Ms. Robison demonstrated in her novel, Oh! Loosely describing the period of adjustment undergone by a town and its new college football coach, "Again" presents suburban life in all its demented banality and absurdist splendor.

These occasional forays into the familiarly bizarre are balanced by stories in which Ms. Robison does what she is best known for—creating understated vignettes that dissect and illuminate the foibles and secret anxieties of the upper middle class. In "Your Errant Mom," a woman who refuses to take refuge within the fragile comfort of a marriage that is crumbling seeks out her high school art teacher before she leaves (because "it's necessary to say goodbye to someone"). Eventually she accepts that failure in her two biggest roles to date (wife and mother) at least allows her the chance to explore other roles. Her concluding observation, "I wanted what I wanted," provides a good example of the complex resonances Ms. Robison sometimes generates from eloquent simplicity. In "Mirror," two longtime girlfriends sit side by side in a hair salon near the Watergate, exchanging a series of remarks that reveal the undercurrents of difference and larger patterns of similarity in the lives they've come to inhabit. Another splintered marriage leads the female narrator of "In the Woods" to her sister's Indiana farm, where the summer heat and the insistent bugs, together with tractor sounds and the rich smells of animals and flowers, combine to refocus her anger and to lead her out on daily horseback rides, during one of which she experiences a thrilling, epiphanic moment: "It was as though the world had died but not quite yet bothered to topple. Blades of grass, bugs, blank sky … were all cast in glass. I was alone in it and feeling suddenly afloat, as if I had bolted a lot of champagne."

That this woman can suddenly see herself "afloat" in the midst of her miseries and self-doubts is a small but significant personal triumph that doesn't prevent her from sobbing into the phone the next several nights; and the truth her sister tells her at the story's end—"Being so selfish and wrong often brings with it a sort of strength. You know?"—is similarly measured, with the sources of its comfort lying not in its grand profundity but in its simple applicability. These notes of quiet but insistent affirmation occur frequently in Believe Them, but they are not meant to be resolutions in the traditional sense. Ms. Robison recognizes that disquieting self-doubts and fears produced by what one character calls "the big things" are never as easily resolved as most story writers would lead us to believe.

This sort of restraint and refusal to supply her incidents with a more conventionally dramatic shape occasionally produces stories that evoke a sense of "So what?"; more often, however, Ms. Robison's methods allow the careful reader an honest perspective into lives usually dealt with either melodramatically or contemptuously by other authors. Throughout this collection, Ms. Robison asks us to believe that people possessing six-figure bank accounts and ranchstyle suburban homes feel much the same confusions, resentments and longings as everyone else; she asks us to believe that they exist in a milieu in which the denial or sublimation of anguish and raw emotion is expected. Believe her? We do.