‘Objects of Desire:’ Privileged angst worth reading about

The characters in Clare Sestanovich’s debut story collection, “Objects of Desire,” are middle- to uppermiddle-class, well-educated and tightly wrapped. They’re baby boomers or their 20something kids who haven’t quite grown up. While those with jobs in marketing or tech can afford to live in glass high-rises, the aspiring artists and writers either have lots of roommates or temporarily move back home.

Sestanovich, an editor at The New Yorker, is an elegant writer whose stories deftly capture the foods, clothes and customs of contemporary life. Parents grapple with their daughter’s anorexia. A couple wonders if it is ethical to keep a cat in a small apartment. A woman is hired as a night nanny for a little girl who has three day nannies.

Over the 11 stories, told in a variety of different voices, we meet a large, angsty, mostly privileged cast of characters who nonetheless seem to reflect a society that’s been knocked back on its heels. For the most part, the themes are domestic, not political — polyamory, infidelity, abandonment, isolation.

If the younger people in these stories had been alive in the 1920s or ’30s, they might have trudged off to war. In the ’50s, hit the road. In the ’60s or ’70s, turned on and dropped out. These characters, by contrast, seem hemmed in, uptight, ambivalent about having children, uncertain about the path forward, doomed to live up to their parents’ or their own high expectations, and struggling to do the right thing and not succumb to despair.