The nine remarkable stories in Above the Houses compel the reader to experience what the author has elsewhere called "a kind of ecology of consciousness: how to use well and not squander our stupendous human resources for insight." The dramas they describe—ranging from death, divorce and murder to a torrential Midwestern rainstorm—provide a context for the author's astonishing ability to capture subtle human feelings, whether those of old people, children, lovers or the lonely.
In the title piece, the wife of an academic nomad faces by herself—without her children, who have flown the nest, or friends, who are yet to be made—the adjustment to a new community. In the passage of a single ordinary day, she makes intricate new connections "as if long-estranged beings had been tapping from both sides at once of a door that has simply dissolved." In "Time's Body," a man still in mid-life, worn down by the dying of his wife, rises up from his exhaustion to face the monumentality of everyday living.
Set in the heartland of America and suggestive of writers like Alice Munro and William Trevor, each story, in its own extraordinary way, poses the dilemma of the father in the volume's concluding story, "Rain," when he asks "to be told why I care so much how I live if it is all to end anyway." And each offers the answer he gets: "because it does not end."