Certain American States by Catherine Lacey review – piercingly good short stories

Love, loss and the missed connections of family life are restlessly observed in this profoundly playful collection from the American writer

A sentence, in English, is as long as a piece of string. You can keep going so long as you don’t arrive, so it is as much about deferment as delivery. The long sentence is an open road: our pleasure comes not just from the sights along the way but also from the pace of the trip, the writer’s ability to change tack from clause to clause, to spin, twist, add, qualify and generally dodge syntactical mortality. It is often funny – not because of the content, so much as the rhythm, the sense of freedom and avoidance, of dancing between the full stops. Catherine Lacey’s stories are bark-out-loud funny in a way that makes the reader feel a little odd. Much of her work is about pointlessness. Characters wander from nowhere much to a different kind of nowhere. Stories about couples start after the failure of the relationship and simply continue. They are all, however, driven by an expressive energy, by uncontainable personality, wit and the restless need, in the plots as in the sentences, to get the hell away.

In Lacey’s 2015 first novel Nobody Is Ever Missing there is a long sentence in which the narrator talks about how she fell in love with her husband’s losses and bereavements as he fell in love with hers. The sentence circles around these double absences for a number of pages, to give a description of mutual sympathy that is impossibly tactful, elegant and sad. Lacey’s characters cry a lot. They like crying, even though it gives them no relief. In the story “Family Physics” Bridget watches her sister admiringly, in a fast food outlet: “That morning Linda made me realise that the public cry was truly an art that contained possibilities I had not previously known.”

You can let this story push you around or find it almost immoral to use language in a way that seems so self‑delighted

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