Ordinary tribulations and small moments

Joshua Ferris masters the short story

Joshua Ferris is regarded as one of the best young writers of literary fiction working today, praised by critics for his originality and humor. His first novel, “Then We Came to theEnd,” won the PEN/Hemingway Prize, and “To Rise Again at a DecentHour” was one of the first American novels short-listed for the Booker in 2014. But none of this meant he could tackle that most difficultform, the short story.

In “The Dinner Party and Other Stories,” Mr. Ferris carries off the short story admirably. This collection hits the sweet spot between character realism and existentially wry musings on modern life. Mr. Ferris’ style is clean and muscular without bearing any strong resemblance to the past masters of that style. He’s funny without foundering into whimsy.

In the past, Mr. Ferris has drawn favorable comparisons with Jonathan Franzen, but this collection shows Mr. Ferris as the funnier of the two. None of Mr. Franzen’s novels has been as light or enjoyable to read. And yet comparing Mr. Ferris to others is misleading.

The appeal of these stories lies not in their proximity to anyone else’s legacy. “The Dinner Party” is a book full of surprises, both in style and content, and Mr. Ferris is a unique voice in modern prose.

The characters in these stories especially feel real. Mr. Ferris takes time and space to build their inner worlds. An old widower waiting for a call from his family on his birthday. A serial eavesdropper. A semi-famous actor visiting his lover’s apartment. A hack move in literary fiction is to supply your reader with a “normal” protagonist, a relatable space from which to view a rogue’s gallery of unusual characters.

The opposite error, of course, is to make the central character a mess of vices and perversions, a cypher for every repressed impulse. Mr. Ferris falls into neither mistake. He dares to let his characters be normal, in the awkward, human way real people are.

Describing the stories in plot terms would be misleading. Their quality is more in how they’re put together than in their constituent parts. In the tale from which the book takes its title, a couple begin to unravel after their friends fail to show up to a dinner party.

In “A Night Out,” a woman ditches her philandering husband on their way to have dinner with her parents and, through a series of unlikely events, forces him to face his indiscretions. In “A Fair Price,” a man hires out a stranger to help him move his possessions out of a storage unit, who somehow uncovers old memories of his abusive stepfather.

In some stories, very little happens. This is not to say that “The Dinner Party” falls into the other lit-fiction rut — lack of plot. These are lean tales with plenty of action. But the twists and turns spring from recognizable, messy human motivations.

Mr. Ferris achieves this balancing act through a well-honed sense of narrative time. Each line carries us forward another tick, inviting the reader to inhabit the writer’s deliberate rhythm.

One doesn’t question the implausibility or foolishness of characters’ actions, because each moment seems to contain its own logic. There is no need to extrapolate that logic to some larger rationale, because the world of each character suffices, as doled out in methodically small textured moments.

With “The Dinner Party,” Joshua Ferris creates a world that seems familiar and strange at the same time, with characters we all know doing things we wouldn’t have imagined.