I read and enjoyed Pye’s earlier books, River of Dust and Dreams of the Red Phoenix, both historical novels set in China. Because of my own familiarity with China, I was drawn to these stories of conflict between American missionaries and their Chinese counterparts, set against a backdrop of enormous changes taking place in Chinese society.

...In Shelf Life of Happiness, Virginia Pye explores the fragility and elusiveness of, well, being happy. Adults have a hard time with happiness, she suggests. In “Crying in Italian,” Sara’s marriage has lost its fervor. She and her spouse have become two people with kids, and Sara is leaving for more passionate pastures. In “Redbone,” Tom discovers he was happier before, though he hadn’t known it at the time. It’s that “we didn’t know how good we had it” concept. For Tom, the greener grass was his life before he was successful. Before he’d decided to leave his wife. When he could still go home and hang out with his girls.

Kids are better off, however, as Pye shows us. Kids understand something about happiness that the rest of us don’t. In “Easter Morning,” a nameless boy tries to take care of a dead bird. And there’s something about caring for things, about something living on after death, that a group of mothers want to preserve in this child. To care despite death, to treat something as a living thing after it is no longer, is something important—and this kid knows it. In “An Awesome Gap,” Patrick, a fifteen-year-old skateboarder, wants to show his dad how to “live in the now.” He’d never become “a slave to work” the way his father is. He’s going to live in “real places” with “real people.”...

Wow. Here is a collection of rather stunning short stories, spanning varied ideals and lives, each succeeding in quietly unsettling my mind. The writing is so sure of itself, it was quite satisfying to get to the end of each story. Not to oversimplify, they are about: a man meeting his dying friend to act as best man in his Reno wedding; a woman traveling with her children in Italy; an art dealer (and a stray dog); an aspiring skater, his tag-along brother, and their condescending father; the brutal murder of a family on New Year’s, and a trip to NYC; burying a rotting bird on Easter; a middle aged artist and his “big” break (in his work and from his family); a young woman in Cambridge struggling to find a passion for work, and sticking near to her hometown & her aging parents; and a man and a woman, each married to other people, not so quietly carrying out an affair.