Collection an attempt to explain modern life

“(T)he American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality,” wrote Philip Roth in 1961. “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.”

Nearly 60 years later, Chuck Klosterman is faced with an even steeper task, but in his latest book, the short-story collection “Raised in Captivity,” he beats no retreat. Rather, he paints incredible alternate realities through which he can explore, obliquely, what it means to be alive today.

The book’s subtitle, “Fictional Nonfiction,” is a way in. While these stories are often absurd, they are nevertheless clearly intended as comments on where we are and where

we’re headed. In one, a medical procedure allows expectant mothers to redirect natal pain to their partners. In another, a rock band achieves accidental success when one of its songs becomes “a runaway alt-right banger.”

This is a series of skits cooked up for the here and now. As any thought piece will tell you, we live in an age in which certainty has vanished; information cannot be trusted. And so, in “The Truth About Food,” we read of “an era when traditional science was trusted less, so radical concepts could be engaged,” facilitating conclusions like: “Medically speaking, carrots and Kit Kats are identical.”

Klosterman’s ironydrenched world is still recognizably our own and produces in his characters familiar effects. Although we live in an age of informational ubiquity, the withering of facts in public discourse has stunted our instincts; like the man faced with a puma in a • “Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction” (Penguin Press, 320 pages, $26) by Chuck Klosterman

business-class lavatory at the start of this collection, a lack of conviction and certainty renders many of us unable to act.

While technology may have organized us into giant networks, achieving genuine human connection seems harder than ever — thus a man hearing a psychiatrist claim you can’t cry while tasting something new and delicious is fooled into thinking he can safely break up with his girlfriend over a famous duck dish.

The real cougar in the bathroom is barely mentioned, although the irony of a political system where the line between fiction and nonfiction has been effaced to the point of meaninglessness is felt

throughout. It’s this system, Klosterman suggests in a single unambiguous reference, that has produced a president “pretending to be a president who shouldn’t be the president.”

If this flavor of zeitgeist feels overpowering, be assured at least that Klosterman zips through these tales with such vigor, such celerity (most don’t exceed seven or eight pages), that the reader has little time to question their novelty or integrity. It’s a quick-draw approach that plays to his strengths as a stylist and comic.

Not all of the stories work, and sometimes the concept is too thin. Technique at the local level — the firework sentence, the quick laugh — always seems to trump the quality of the idea. This is the inherent vice in Klosterman’s work at large, which also encompasses novels, essays, sports and music journalism.

But for the most part, “Raised in Captivity” is an engagingly sardonic collection that will leave you, like one of Klosterman’s own bewildered characters, “relaxed and confused.”