Love actually

“Where the God of Love Hangs Out’’ distills this view to the point of what, in less deft hands, would be formula. What saves the book is partly its structure. The 12 stories include two quartets of linked stories, each focusing on a pair of lovers; the remaining four stories are unrelated to the quartets and to each other. So “Where the God of Love Hangs Out’’ isn’t the usual short story collection; but it isn’t really a novel-in-stories, either. The book’s structure refracts its characters from different angles while hewing to its theme, expressed in the title. The resulting tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces, like a cubist painting, holds the reader in thrall. Bloom creates her own special brand of suspense. Major events happen off-stage, in the interstices between stories. We don’t wait to see what happens next, but rather, to see the next angle on what’s happened.

That next angle nearly always surprises. William and Clare, the unlikely lovers in the first quartet of the stories - “people with three children, two marriages, and a hundred and ten years between us’’ - first seduce each other in bathrobe and pajamas by the light of late-night TV. The overweight, out-of-shape, resolutely gourmandizing William is between heart attacks; yet his touch through Clare’s double layer of nightclothes “captured my whole body’s attention.’’ There are great comic possibilities here, of course, and Bloom exploits them. When William suffers an attack of gout, the lovers’ tryst takes place at his sickbed, with ”his foot uncovered and resting, like the royal turnip, on a round velvet pillow.” But each time their unfolding affair threatens to turn slapstick, Bloom shows us these characters’ inner lives in all their deeply human complexity, and we find ourselves, willing or not, on their side.