CERTAIN AMERICAN STATES

CATHERINE LACEY

Granta, 208pp, £12.99

Praise for this collection of short stories about in-betweenness and uncertainty was unstinting. Check out the very first story, said an admiring Sam Leith in the Financial

Times: it’s a ‘complete belter; maybe the best thing in a series of seriously good short stories’. They ‘aren’t at all samey’, Leith went on. ‘But they do have a common stamp. As the punning title hints, these are states of mind rather than federal states, and they are a narrowish band: uncertain states; states of breakdown.’

Over at the Guardian, fellow novelist Anne Enright was also bowled over: ‘Much of her work is about pointlessness. Characters wander from nowhere much to a different kind of nowhere. Stories about couples start after the failure of the relationship and simply continue. They are all, however, driven by an expressive energy, by uncontainable personality, wit and the restless need, in the plots as in the sentences, to get the hell away.’

Sinéad Gleeson in the Irish Times was also thrilled: ‘The laughs are welcome: the tone throughout the collection rarely wavers, ricocheting back to deadpan, whenever the volume is turned up even slightly. This could veer into sameness or repetition, but Lacey’s skill – her approach to sentences is often ruthless economy – offers consistency.’ And for Francesca Carington in the Daily Telegraph, the stories were nothing short of ‘superb’: ‘Everyone in Catherine Lacey’s first collection (she has written two novels) is going through a lot: break-ups, divorces, deaths in the family, abandonment, losing jobs, losing cats, being inexplicably imprisoned in fancy hotel suites. As a cashier at that grocery store puts it: “It’s a very strange time in this country, isn’t it? Very transitional.”’