Atavists

Millet (A Children’s Bible) delivers a crystalline and mordantly funny linked story collection about a web of friends and neighbors in Southern California. In “Tourist,” divorced mom Trudy gets her kicks by “courting her own disgust” via scrolling her phone for cringy updates from a former friend turned “wife guy.” She also marvels at the disconnect between her friend Amy’s curated online world (jet-skiing with the fam) and trouble at home, which Trudy discovers over drinks with Amy. “Fetishist” follows Amy’s husband, Buzz, as he discovers geriatric porn in the family computer’s browser history, which he deduces was viewed by his live-in son-in-law, Luis. He commits a “major tactical error” by telling Amy, who, instead of sharing a laugh with him as he’d expected, pressures him to confront Luis. In “Gerontologist,” a recent high school graduate volunteers in a nursing home, where an elderly resident tells her about having sex with a fellow resident, who has dementia, on his “lucid days.” Millet’s cutting dialogue is as sharp as ever (Amy “needs to invest in some Spanx. Like, yesterday,” claims a cruel friend of her daughter’s in “Dramatist”), and the stories end with surprising and moving insights into her characters’ deepest fears and desires. The author is at the top of her game. (Apr.)