These crucial, often darkly hilarious arraignments and instigations place before us a parade of defectives and solitaries, all running through the heart's entire repertory in pursuit of a fitting catastrophe of the self.

In "Certain Riddances," a cordovanned and cuff-linked office crank pushes his way into a final round of interoffice harassments. The sour-mouthed teenager of "SMTWTFS" comes down with a case of pointed, retaliatory homosexuality. In "Devotions," an offcast from couplehood recounts, in extremis, the downturns of three desolating marriages. The word-shy apartment dweller of "Esprit de l'Elevator" lets himself out of his sleep just long enough to explain away his suspicious solitudes to his neighbors.

In "Not the Hand but Where the Hand Has Been," a guilt-ravaged father pours the secrets of his grown daughter's life into the narrow columns of the index he is compiling on the cheap for a university-press book he is certain no one will ever read.