Lorrie Moore's Bark has subtle bite.

I wanted to ignore Lorrie Moore’s new collection of short stories. “Bark” is getting so much praise from so many corners; I wanted to find a flaw. I didn’t want to agree with others, but I confess, for the most part, I do. Regarded a master of the form, Moore nonetheless took a fifteen- year hiatus after her last collection “Birds of America.” She returns with eight tales of men and women in crisis and confusion, certain only of the missing safety net as they toe the high wire of love and loss. Her women are troubled, her men awash as much in determination as doubt. In “Debarking,” Ira, divorced six months, wobbles between his worry for his young daughter Bekka and his new, but awkward relationship with the pediatrician Zora. Bumping into these bookends, he is convinced he is “watching history from the dimmest of backwaters, a land of beer and golf.” Zora’s relationship with her sixteen-year old son Bruno, monosyllabic and doughy, vexes Ira. His Bekka welcomes a new cat, but can’t reconcile Ira’s pronouncement that, “’We cheat the power of time with our very brevity.’” Bruno, “broad –shouldered and thick limbed,” wedges between his mother and Ira. After a communal dinner, “Zora and Bruno, some distance behind him, began to jostle up against each other, ramming lightly into each other’s sides.” Their physical closeness, what Ira misses in his life, unsettles him, played out weirdly by mother and son. Moore certainly draws me in with her opening story, but she as quickly loses me with “The Juniper Tree.” Though there is subtle brilliance in the idea that the narrator and her middle aged friends recognize how, “In rejecting the lives of (their) mothers, (they) found themselves looking for stray volts of mother love in the very places they could never be found,” I can’t appreciate that the three friends are visiting the ghost of their recently dead friend. The introspection is clever, but the premise if too off-putting to work nearly as well as some other stories here. Another such workable story is “Paper Losses,” a glimpse into the failing marriage of Kit and Rafe. Kit realizes in time, “A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life.” With Kit, their three young children both a wonder and a distraction, she understands, “It was like being snowbound with someone’s demented uncle: Should marriage be like that,” she wonders. Of course, marriage should not be like that, but in Moore’s stories, most all relationships are, by turns banging dangerously against the rocks, then listing idly in still but deep waters. Her most solid effort is “Wings.” KC and Dench wash up on the edge of poverty, marooned by a gentrified disinterest. KC, a failed musician, recognizes how, ““The gardenia in (her) throat, the flower that was her singing voice…had already begun its rapid degeneration into simple crocus, then scraggly weed.” KC cultivates instead a symbiotic relationship with her widower neighbor Milt, who exclaims, “It’s lonely in this neck of the woods,” amplifying the heart of Moore’s most consistent theme. I resisted “Bark” as long as possible. But Lorrie Moore’s command of short story makes these new selections impossible to ignore. Good Reading.