Though acclaimed as a novelist, Bette Pesetsky has established her reputation as a short-story writer on the basis of two volumes: Stories up to a Point (1981) and Confessions of a Bad Girl (1989). Writing exclusively about women fallen into sadness, loss, and despair, Pesetsky rescues them with "flashes of hilarious pessimism," as David Quammen put it (in the New York Times Book Review, 14 February 1982). Her narrators (wives, mothers, sisters, and friends) emerge shakily from unstable, broken, or shattered relationships, yet, as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote (in the New York Times, 15 January 1982), they "go on looking desperately for continuity ... wherever they can find it." The female characters in Pesetsky's stories, bereft of happiness, really cannot be of much help to one another; they are so often at odds that further intimacy only adds to their grief. The continuity they seek is often elusive.

Pesetsky's "struggle with the forms of fiction," as...