E-Mail This Article to a Friend Local color Barbara Sutton’s stories cruise the neighborhood BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
	The Send-Away Girl By Barbara Sutton. University of Georgia Press, 216 pages, $24.95

An extraordinary satisfaction results from encountering an author who writes in a way specific to one’s own time and place. The stories in Belmont resident Barbara Sutton’s fierce and funny debut collection, The Send-Away Girl (University of Georgia Press), are of the present: the present time, this moment in the modern world, and the present place, Boston. Although her Flannery O’Connor Award–winning collection will certainly appeal to audiences outside Boston, readers in town are in for a particular delight.

Even in the stories that don’t make reference to the area, Sutton’s characters are over-educated and hyper-aware in a way that’s specific to Boston and Cambridge. Local readers will recognize the practiced distance of these people, the way they’re entitled and insecure all at once. You’ve passed her characters crossing the Longfellow Bridge, catching eyes but not exchanging smiles. You’ve overheard her characters in Whole Foods buying Mediterranean olives, talking about the song lyrics of a favorite band. This is a city of hard-won warmth, and in bright and biting prose, clever without being cold and compassionate without being sentimental, Sutton writes about characters who struggle to connect with themselves, with others, and with the world, who struggle to chip away at the brittle exterior of other people in order to reach a warmer core, and who struggle to allow others that same access.

In "The Art of Getting Real," Sutton nails the angst and anger of a 16-year-old boy. The narrator is a Pavement-quoting Holden Caufield with an acute bullshit detector and an adolescent scorn for façade. His father absent even before keeling over from a heart attack, the kid looks elsewhere for role models, and he finds them, High Fidelity style, working at a used-record store. These guys "know what they are, and they never try to make you believe they don’t." It’s the most heroic trait imaginable for this kid. His deadbeat dad has just died, and he knows he’s expected to cry for his father, but he rails against the expectation with a wise-for-his-years understanding: "I think people cry because they’re afraid of getting real, because that might mean thinking about how much they don’t love their loved ones."

It’s a thread that runs through many of Sutton’s stories. In "Brotherhood of Healing," she’s equally convincing in the voice of an old woman. In the hospital after her second stroke, Mrs. Rodgers realizes that her dead husband was not a man to be loved. What’s remarkable is the way Sutton expresses the inevitable process of being left behind by the world when age renders one obsolete. What’s more troubling to Mrs. Rodgers than death is the state of the world "with the hundred-kinds-of-coffee mentality going full throttle." Her endearing curmudgeonly observations make it clear she’s no longer at home: "She and her poor husband tried and tried to have babies until he called time-out for good. Of course this was way before sticking test tubes in the freezer and way before there were ads for Viagra behind home plate at Yankee Stadium."

The hilarious "Tenants" features a woodchuck holing up under the house, an ex-boyfriend holing up in a closet, a suicidal renter holding himself hostage, and the mother and the pair of sisters who have to deal with them. To talk Jeoffry out of killing himself, the mother urges one of her daughters to recite some poetry over a bullhorn, making it "open mike night at the hostage standoff." Eschewing Keats and Donne, Gwendolyn recites the words to the Captain and Tennille’s "Muskrat Love." It turns out to be Jeoffry’s favorite song. The dialogue is as amusing as the situation: " ’Speaking of hostage,’ Larry whispered, motioning toward the woman with the leggings, ‘how many pounds d’ya suppose she’s got trapped inside those pants?’ "

"Risk Merchants" has a similarly sarcastic cast of characters: fat and famed music critic Teddy, privileged eco-lover Devon, two very different girls named Peachy. The title story, which takes place in Central and Copley Squares, is the dreariest in the set, melancholy like a too-warm November afternoon, and "Empire of Light" is too literal in dealing with the theme of not loving the people you should. But even here, there are moments when the prose just shines. Sutton finds an undeniable comedy in our darkest sorrows.

Barbara Sutton reads this Wednesday, October 6, at 7:30 p.m. at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street in Newton; call (617) 244-6619. Then on October 28 at 7 p.m., she reads with fellow short-story writers David Means and Merrill Feitell at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Coolidge Corner; call (617) 566-6660.