They Linger

Mark Anthony Jarman rarely affords his varied characters moments of revelation or Joycean epiphanies. But he is nonetheless fascinated by the ways in which a single instance can reverberate across a lifetime. In his latest story collection, Smash & Grab, these split seconds are often occasions of violence, either inflicted or implied. A woman accidentally hits a child with her car and flees the scene. A swimmer sees dead refugees on the beach and floating in the sea. Now and then, they are just absurd, as when a man finds a tooth in a toilet bowl at a bar. They are rarely transformative, but they linger. Whether writing about Canada, Italy, Ireland, or the moon, Jarman finds an incongruity and maps it onto a wider melancholy.

In “The Bodies,” a former hockey player tools around off the coast of Washington State in a sailboat with his friend Bruno. When they return home to their commune in the British Columbia interior, they find two dead bodies at their...