[Joy Williams's "Taking Care" contains some] wonderfully crisp writing and patches of bleak humor that made me guffaw. Social disjunction and the discontinuity of relationships are … chief concerns, with most of the stories in "Taking Care" focused on the imperfect efforts of husbands and wives trying marriage for the second or third time, and on the children surviving (in various degrees of disability) from the earlier attempts. Also dogs: There are many waifish canines from these broken homes, all of them portrayed with high sympathy and most cast as important secondary characters. Joy Williams has dogs the way John Irving has bears. And in fact Miss Williams seems to judge her people largely on these two bases: whether or not they can make a better second marriage and whether they get along well with dogs. The criteria are probably sounder than most.

But again the state of affairs...