Interestingly enough, Thompson's first story collection, "The Gasoline Wars" (1979), appeared as part of a group effort: four such volumes by as many authors, published by the University of Illinois Press. The collection "Little Face" (1984) and the NBA-nominated one "Who Do You Love" (1999) followed, as did four increasingly well-received novels, including "Wide Blue Yonder" (2001) and "City Boy" (2004).
Her latest gathering of 12 gritty, firmly unsentimental tales continues to mine the territory over which Canada's Alice Munro would seem to hold North American rights: the subject announced by the title of Munro's acclaimed "Lives of Girls and Women."
The younger targets of Thompson's gimlet eye include "The Brats," a high school pair consisting of an angry, asocial girl (Iris) and her overweight sociopathic classmate (Rico). In their sick braggadocio, we sense the kind of latent violence that erupts all too frequently in schools these days (though in this duo's case, the harm they cause is almost farcically accidental).
Their inchoate fantasies of afflicting the adult world are more troublingly realized by Jessie of "The Five Senses." Bored with her middle-class family's unglamorous ways, she runs off to Florida with a vicious drifter ("R.B.") who exploits and abuses the clueless teen's rejection of suburban values and embrace of "this new one . . . [which] was like the ocean. It took you places without your knowing." Precisely.
Unsettled adult relationships are analyzed with trenchant, dispassionate clarity in a good story ("Lost") about an ingenuous salesgirl's forlorn fixation on a sullen biker still obsessed with the girl who had dumped him; and a mediocre one about a rejected woman seeking to reinvent herself in Alaska, though still compelled to make nuisance calls to the married lover who no longer wants her ("The Inside Passage").
