A thread runs through the stories of Show Don’t Tell: the viewpoint of a – neither especially happily nor unhappily – married woman in her mid-to-late forties with children, trying to comprehend what precisely her life is. In fact, the collection might be renamed Reflections on a Midlife Crisis. There is variation, of course, but regardless, this uniformity isn’t a negative. Each story builds on the last. One gets the sense that the protagonists could all have been friendly neighbours at one time or another.

Were Sittenfeld less obviously capable, I’d say that it’s what she accidentally reveals about the characters that makes these stories interesting. But her acuity is so startling (almost like an emotional X-ray vision) that she might be one of those astonishing writers whose sentences are replete with slow, studied intentionality. For example, upon hearing that a man who bullied her in their teens now has ALS, the protagonist of Giraffe and Flamingo thinks:

“One of the surprises of adulthood for me has been that, as the years pass, it has become less rather than more clear to me whether I’m a good or bad person. Learning Jack Olney had ALS certainly didn’t make me feel gleeful; it was deeply depressing. But ... I became aware of a blooming internal admiration for myself for not feeling glee and, really, I wasn’t so sure this self-regard was any less reprehensible.”

Here as in elsewhere, Sittenfeld captures an idiosyncratic yet, one imagines, representative version of what it is to be a fairly comfortable white woman in the American Midwest, with all of the hand-wringing that goes with it. And she does this so well that, whatever you think of such a woman, the depiction is extremely interesting. Precise, perhaps even clinical, but certainly interesting – her tone is scientific, as though these could be anthropological studies rather than stories. Luckily, she has a satisfyingly dark sense of humour, and her writing doesn’t suffer from the cloying virtuousness so prevalent in American fiction nowadays. She isn’t moralising, she’s curious. It’s as though, through the stories, she’s trying to figure out a puzzle. Something along the lines of “Is this it?” Or, to give Sittenfeld her due, more like, “Wait, what is this?”