An Intrepid Chronicler of Sundry Experiences

YOU HAVE A FRIEND IN 10A: Stories, by Maggie Shipstead

As far as her subjects go, the novelist Maggie Shipstead does not have a type. An intrepid chronicler of sundry experiences, she’s written about an elite, shotgun-ish wedding (“Seating Arrangements”), a former ballerina who once helped a Soviet dancer defect (“Astonish Me”) and the kindred souls of a plucky 20th-century aviator and the movie star who portrays her (“Great Circle”). Shipstead’s new book, the short story collection “You Have a Friend in 10A,” cannot be summed up so readily. Running the gamut between parodic faux-autofiction and historical fiction narrated by a bevy of marooned, increasingly dissolute Frenchwomen, the stories here are almost studiously varied. They were written over 10 years, during which Shipstead received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, popped over to Stanford University as a Stegner fellow and wrote three other books as well as occasional features for magazines including Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure and Departures.

Travel being as serviceable a metaphor as any for reading, Shipstead’s work has been widely lauded for “transporting” her readers. She likes to ground her fiction in reality and has a penchant for research, with an ear tuned to social codes and niche terminology. Like Emma Cline, she is drawn to reanimating familiar cultural figures and tropes and tends to approach character-writing in terms of specialties — who has one, who might need a different one, who’s faking theirs. Ski bums, showbiz types and figurative artists recur in this collection. In the title story, an actress and former adherent of a Scientology-like cult describes Hollywood as a place where people discuss “green lights and opening grosses and sex”; the immeasurably chill skier protagonist of “Backcountry” calls her peers who work seasonally at mountain resorts “lifties”; in “The Cowboy Tango,” a rancher’s throat is — what else? — his “craw.” In moments like these, selecting just the right word (“proboscis” appears in two stories) seems key to Shipstead’s mission of earning nods of recognition, little assurances that we are with her, well along the beaten path of escapism.

There is a generous spirit beneath Shipstead’s controlled, sometimes finicky style, but her most immersive stories are the ones that seem to escape her. They take perverse turns to arrive at open endings. The sure standout is “La Moretta,” which follows a young couple on their honeymoon in 1974: He’s a square recently afflicted with wanderlust; she’s a world-weary Army daughter. The newlyweds are doomed from the start, but somewhere in the Romanian foothills, their claustrophobic anti-romance transforms into folk horror à la “The Wicker Man.” This shift is at once obvious and imperceptible, the kind of unfolding that makes people say a catastrophe is like watching a car crash in slow motion. Incidentally, a car crash is just the event that allows Shipstead to veer off course. “Angel Lust” does something similar, as does “Acknowledgments,” the collection’s one truly funny story, which also bears the distinction of making a sportive reference to Jonathan Franzen’s 2002 New Yorker essay about “book-club books” and William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.”

Shipstead’s less successful stories (“Souterrain,” “In the Olympic Village”) tend to be either too self-conscious of their status as short fiction — undertaking countless jumps back and forward in time to extract maximum poignancy — or plainly unfinished. “In the Olympic Village” is, unfortunately, as bland as its title: A world-class gymnast and a world-class runner have vanilla sex after they fail to win medals. We hear all about their muscle tone and incompatible backgrounds, but it amounts to little more than a drawn-out scene padded with flashbacks. For a story about expectations being tested, this one is, ironically, free of surprise. It’s entertaining enough, but dutiful short works like these can make readers ask beside-the-point questions like, “Should this have been a novel?”

YOU HAVE A FRIEND IN 10A: Stories, by Maggie Shipstead | 253 pp. | Knopf | $27

Lizzy Harding is an associate editor at Bookforum.