Roy Kesey’s novella Nothing in the World struck a balance between precise attention to details and powerful awareness of a larger story behind them. His debut collection All Over (also the debut title from Dzanc Books, excepting a welcome reissue of Nothing) demonstrates a similar attention, offering a series of stories broad in their aspirations and range yet united to some degree by a way of engaging the world through its most minute moments.

These stories sometimes read like databases of elements waiting to be assembled, as in “Fontanel”‘s snapshot by snapshot account of a child’s birth into a strained marriage and a hospital full of medical staff with troubled or troubling lives. It is left for the reader to make what he or she will of this assemblage, and that theme of creation — of world-building or, more often, rebuilding — is central to the collection, as in this passage from “Strike”:

For a week and more there was no further note of the strike, but there was a sense of it, Chantal, a swelling and strain, the brownstones choked with pie-tins and peels, with pheasant gnawed, promises kept, thoughts thought and smells smelled and sighs sighed. And what good was all this to us? What gathered in basements, on stairwells, when it was all not ours but theirs, and would only be ours when tossed and strewn, for that was the treaty, however unsigned.

Equating the sensual, physical details of pie-tins and peels with less tangible feelings and sighs, the narrator’s language undergoes its own “swelling and strain” as if seeking a new way to describe a world as overwhelming and overloaded as a city in the midst of a garbage strike or communications explosion. Other characters in other stories struggle to repair their lives by arranging the details into a workable order, perhaps most powerfully in the opening story “Invunche y voladora,” about a couple honeymooning in Chile following a failed pregnancy. They visit scenic waterfalls and other sights recommended by a guidebook that “tells the spouses to be reminded of Ireland, a place they’ve never been,” and they are indeed reminded of Ireland, or at least the Ireland of reassuring, expected touristic details that bring comfort in the face of the wounding unknown. Something of a guidebook itself, “Invunche” is a text in which every possible detail, every expected and clichéd experience of a honeymoon in Chile, seems to be included like an erector set for Kesey’s characters and for his readers, too. In similar fashion, the teenagers of “At the Pizza Hut, the Girls Build Their Towers” construct architecturally complex meals and defense mechanisms alike from the banal ingredients of a salad bar as they jostle and joust in conversation for social status and fleeting reassurance.

Calling these stories of self-help would diminish them, but these characters often seem to be searching for answers expected to arrive in obvious, tangible forms. There are packages tied up with string and green shiny parcels, and a suitcase everyone wants to get their hands on, and though the contents of these recurring receptacles are never revealed their promising presence is enough to inspire murder and vandalism and love. “Instituto”‘s protagonist seeks his answers in a mysterious clinic where he is stripped of his bodily scars (among undergoing other “perfections”) as if reversing time to escape tragic moments and relive his life, while in “Cheese” a very minor historical figure learns precisely what his impact on the future will be and wonders if it it will be enough. “For what?” his inquisitor asks, to which the condemned bit player responds, “Fair enough.” Each tries to isolate the point at which a life becomes what it is, asking as the narrator of “Fontanel” asks, “Do you understand, now, in what ways those things mattered to this moment?” In a fragmented story converging around a single moment as delicate and unformed as the suture of its title, this is no easy question because that answer can take many shapes.

In “[Exuent.,” that answer comes in the form of a device instead of a package:

Liesl saw an internet ad for a universal television turner-offer. It was advertised as a universal turner-onner, but she knew what it was really for. It had never occurred to her to want one before but she wanted one now and put in her credit card details and address and a week later it came. Long and thin and gray, no buttons for channels or volume or programming, just the one button, On/Off. She put in the batteries, pointed it at her television , and was a little surprised that the thing actually worked: on and off, on and off. She smiled and went to look for her purse and for the first few days she used the device only to build small spaces for herself.

Like the overloaded sidewalks of “Strike” and the guidebook-directed experience of “Invunche y voladora,” Liesl’s world is saturated and noisy until she finds an object with which to “build small spaces” of quiet. “[Exuent.” continues,

the first clear evidence that the world was improving did not arrive until the afternoon she came upon a small crowd standing on the sidewalk, watching a replay of the previous night’s Oscar ceremony in the window of a Chinese restaurant.

Despite the many tragedies in these stories, and the suffering most of their characters endure, they are often hopeful the way Liesl is hopeful. Kesey’s stories build their own small, quiet spaces for reflection and calm, and he shares those spaces with his readers. Not by telling us how to read his stories or what to read into them, but by presenting us with the options and letting us decide for ourselves. All Over is the promising package and the guidebook and the universal turner-onner all at once, and we readers are lucky enough to make the book’s moments matter.