“We do not die from being ill; we die from being alive,” Montaigne wrote. [In About My Table,] Nicholas Delbanco writes of early middle life, when a certain amount of dying has already been done. Bloom has become sheen. The body's youthfulness is still there, but beginning to harden into its own memorial—it will not be renewed. It is the time when blows become cumulative, sapping resiliency and propagating their bruises.

Delbanco's nine short stories are like nine mourners at the same wake. It is a preliminary wake; there will be others. In each story the protagonist is in his late 30s and going through a climacteric of sorts. Forgotten or suppressed bits of life come back to him; but not in the final deathbed's grand retrospective of regret or rejoicing. These are data that must be lived with. It is too soon to give up and too late to hope. But life will be different.

The stories, written with breathtaking technique and an uncanny ability to bring a penetrating emotion up out of a gesture, a pause or a random thought, are independent but linked. They are linked in setting: The men are professors or professionals and live comfortably in western Massachusetts.

They are linked in theme: The protagonists are going through a crisis related to their age. They are divorced, or their marriages have stiffened. A sense of solitude has flooded in on them. They are honorably committed to their lives, they are bound to fidelity, more or less. But other lives entice them—a younger woman, the memory of a past love—to weaken the bindings and the life.

In “The Consolidation of Philosophy,” an architect with a wife and young daughter inhabits a no-man's-land between intimacy and estrangement. Sporadic affection alternates with sporadic fantasy. He sits in his office, spins a globe and imagines going to the Yucatan. He daydreams energetically about elaborate reunions with his first lover, who has become a well-known actress. She has, in fact, hinted once or twice that she would like to see him, but he has never pursued the hints. His real attachments stand in the way; on the other hand, his fantasies drain color from his real life.

There is a similar division in the elaborately constructed “Some in Their Bodies' Force,” where scenes showing the protagonist's life with his wife, and his protective, half-jealous love for his growing daughter, are intercut with memories of a Swedish girl he loved at college. Everything is told as if it were real—at the end he is a medieval adventurer sailing alone up a Norwegian fjord—and so everything has an air of hallucination.

In each of the stories, fidelity and the urge to flight are held in precarious balance, inclining sometimes one way, sometimes the other. But once youth is gone, Delbanco suggests, all choices mean pain and solitude.

In “Traction,” a lawyer flies to the Midwest to settle a client's case. His wife drinks heavily; his infant daughter is having a hip operation that will keep her in a cast for half a year. The trip is necessary; it is also a brief flight from the wounds that have pierced his life. A snowstorm sets in; his Ohio hosts urge him to stay over for a couple of days, and the host's seductive wife is particularly pressing.

She is Circe, he is Ulysses; and after a moment's weakness, he stops his ears and tries to get home through the storm: driving on icy roads, using feeder airlines that land in the wrong places, catching trains. “The Midwest was an obstacle course he was trying to negotiate,” Delbanco writes, with a sure knowledge of how winter can make a 19th-Century ordeal out of travel in that part of the country. There is no reward in the effort; merely faithfulness.

Snow and cold, those symbols of aging, recur. In one story they frame a quarrel; in another they envelop the solitude of a museum curator whose wife has left him. She has gone because she finds he lacks ambition. What he lacks is not ambition, he says, but addition: the compulsion to add one more book, painting or exploit to the great midden of culture. As a curator he is bound to celebrate what exists, not to extend it. He has his point, but he no longer has his wife.

The stories ostensibly put their focus on the protagonist. The play of his yearning, his valor, his weakness and his endurance serves as the subject. But Delbanco is an artist, and he deals in echoes. Shadowy figures in the background manage to be the most vivid: the wives who may drink or walk out, but generally remain steadfast and plucky.

The protagonist's choice is usually to remain faithful to marriage rather than to fantasies. But it is a meager faithfulness and doesn't give much nourishment. A sunny and populated island has become, with the sun setting, a dark shape across the water. From the island's point of view, of course, life continues as before; but the setting sun sees only the shadow it has made.

Delbanco's vision is stoic, just this side of tragic. But his stories are only tangentially bleak. He writes warmly about cold things. His tormented heroes are priggish and winning at the same time, and sometimes comical. The author's gift for comedy is considerable, in fact.

In “Ostinato” the grave strains and reconciliations of a musician's marriage are zanily bombarded by a series of letters from a Japanese girl who had served as an au pair and fallen in love with him. The letters are both touching and funny; their English is sublimely broken, but what is even more broken is their thoughts. Their woozy requests for assistance suggest all manner of things ranging from love through simple cheerfulness to mild blackmail.

The struggling characters in “About My Table” have an enticing virtue to them; one made brittle by time. They possess a quixotic sense of life's beauty. They do not want to die and the prospect, though still distant, disrupts them. But we don't want them to die either, and that is Delbanco's success.