In Love Stories for Hectic People, Catherine McNamara collects thirty-three stories spanning a breathless ninety-nine pages. Never predictable or saccharine, the stories are funny, shocking, carnal, familial, transgressive, transcendent — and full of movement. McNamara’s characters have either just arrived or they’re about to leave. Couples move houses; lovers meet in hotel rooms continents away from home. Her stories, which range in length from barely a paragraph to five pages, take place in Athens, Tokyo, Budapest, Moscow, Sydney, West Africa, Argentina, Ghana, Italy, and France. McNamara can construct an entire existence in the flick of a phrase. Each microfiction unfurls a universe.

The collection opens with a perfect example of this stunning concision. In the first sentence of “As Simple as Water,” readers encounter two lovers at a high-stakes moment in which McNamara bundles their past twenty-four hours with the wild flavor of their affair:

Vasilis K and Marj B are embracing at an Athens train station (it is Ambelokipi) when Vasilis feels Marj’s legs fold under her and sees her eyes roll back, and the woman he has made love to in a hotel room far above and with whom he argued (he knows he was being unjust) falls in a dead faint at his feet as the airport train rolls in on screaming rails.

McNamara’s stories are chock full of this immediacy. Plots unfold quickly, often in the present tense. Humans are complex and shifting, as are partnerships. Infidelity is a fact without melodrama. In “The Height of His Powers,” two competitive snowboarders “stood side by side in the mirror of his room and both snapped photos of their naked bottoms on their phones” before having sex and then returning (across borders) to their partners. “The Last Hike” describes the end of a relationship: “Eric had discovered Eileen sitting upon a man’s undone trousers on a garden bench behind the house, her summer dress about her waist. Eric had run up, pushing the bench over onto the concrete path, so that their bodies sprawled and he was not sure whom his kicks and pummels reached.” All this transience in life and love accumulates to give an impression of energy and youth. Flights are as casual and easy as bus rides, an affair might be had and forgotten, disorder charms.

As might be expected in a collection about love, McNamara’s characters have plenty of sex. McNamara writes about bodies straight on. Specifically — and delightfully — genitals get the serious, loving, literary treatment they deserve. In “Fighters,” ambulance worker Corrine “delighted in the robust life of Matthias’s member, its disregard for the rest of his grumpy body and the fresh tragedies she saw every night.” In “Assunder,” a man accidentally sees a woman’s genitals while she’s peeing in an alley and becomes transfixed: “[T]his other, vivid aperture will be what he sees always, it will make him faint and bring him to a shocked brink; he will see it every day of his life.” The frank, specific beauty of bodies sets the tone for the whole collection, which treats the human experience with an even wisdom.

Readers should come to Love Stories for Hectic People with a pen, ready to underline the collection’s observations about this bungle of human existence, some of which come directly from McNamara’s characters. In “Tokyo Frieze,” a story of two long-distance lovers meeting in a Tokyo hotel, Tanja ruminates: “When she was younger she had felt porous, hyper-human, tied to a common energy or saturation. But now she was confined within the body around her and went no further.” McNamara writes closely to characters, capturing them at their most vulnerable and petty, like Marianne of “The Woman Who Previously Worked that The Louvre,” who, “since her illness began, had come to believe that other people’s lives were less complex, while worrying that her own life would go unrecognized.”

Many stories have titles that are microfictions themselves. Titles like “A Forty-Nine-Year-Old Woman Sends Messages to Her Thirty-Two-Year-Old Lover” and “The Mafia Boss Who Shot His Gay Son on a Beach” pull readers in while orienting them to the stories to follow.

After opening with youth, speed, and affairs, Love Stories for Hectic People arcs toward older, steadier loves. Stories of long relationships and family appear more frequently as the collection progresses. In “The Vineyard,” Sonia, married to one of three brothers who collectively inherit a dying vineyard, expresses her profound love for her husband in a daydream of his defense: “For a moment, she imagined her husband’s heartbreak should their young plants fall lifeless to the ground; how he would sit at the table and she would protect him from his critical brothers.”

Mortality creeps in alongside love in the collection’s final stories. In “The Temperature of Islands,” a woman returns to the vacation island where her husband died of a heart attack and reckons with her own mortality. In “The Woman Who Previously Worked for the Louvre,” a couple hunting for a retirement home balks at living so far outside the city where their fast, exciting lives have taken place: “Who amongst their friends could help them understand the interval that lay between them and their deaths?” In “A Woman Told Me This,” a woman attends her lover’s funeral, hanging back and mourning him in secret while his wife and children do the same front and center. Their lives with the deceased are on display, while her existence has to be kept secret. “Did she feel robbed of a life?” the woman asks herself.

The tales in this collection overflow with insight, action, and humor. Their pace and energy invigorate. Reading them made my world expand in a way that it hasn’t since the pandemic shrunk life down. McNamara is a philosopher, an entertainer — and a gift.

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