Inez

No reliable narrator, Inez tells the story from Iowa to Ithaca to the Andaman islands as she wishes. She seems to know that she is more and less than she seems, but coyly shrugs it off. Things happen both at her behest and without it. She deploys her allure as a flirt but not in a straightforward way. She, despite all this, seems to do no harm, but good. The stories that follow complement Inez. They mix surface and depth, the wisdom of "Minims" down to the catastrophic endurance of a quasi-mythic creature in "A Peculiar Document, " an homage to Kafka.

Inez, not quite matter of fact from Iowa, is the tutelary spirit of the kindred consciousness of these stories.