Russell Edson is one of those originals who appear out of the lonesomeness of a vast, thronged country to create a peculiar and defined world. Seen as through the wrong end of a spyglass, miniscule but singularly clear, this world within a world of his is one in which 'things'—chairs, cups, stones or houses—may be immobile but are not inanimate, and therefore experience solitude and suffering; where animals are unlikely to be dumb; and where man is often essentially immobilized by the failure to communicate. There is interaction but no interrelation. The inanimate before the animate, a child before his parents, man before woman, the eye before the world of appearance, each is alone….

[While The Very Thing That Happens] can be opened anywhere it can also be read as a sequence that begins with marriage as a story of mutual destruction and leads through the...