In the Driver’s Seat

A dark, dazzling, surprisingly funny new collection of stories ( Masterly -Adam Mars Jones, The Observer; A virtuoso performance -Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph) about single women and wives in various phases of midlife-anxious mothers, besotted mothers, beset mothers-in a (futile) search for security and consolation.

Helen Simpson’s stories are short but by no means small. One story takes the Iraq war as its subject; another describes a smoker’s reprieve from death by lung cancer; in another, a simple tale of home maintenance-a woman in a conversation with the carpenter replacing her door after a break-in-becomes a deftly sketched study of grief. In still another, Simpson manages the seemingly impossible-producing laughter at terminal illness and untimely death (this might be the first story in which the amputation of a limb provides a happy ending). And finally, the story entitled Constitutional -a pun on one of the word’s meanings: a walk taken for the benefit of one’s health-deals with memory, family, Alzheimer’s, oak trees, pregnancy for the over-forties, stolen photographs, and crossword puzzles.

Helen Simpson’s stories move and disturb us as they light up the human gift for making the best of it-whatever it is.