As readers of literary fiction, we are drawn to characters facing moral dilemmas. Perhaps most compelling is the “good” person who is confronted with decisions threatening that “goodness” — when morality and identity are at odds with self-preservation and/or desire (often facilitated by a ginned-up plot that allows a protagonist to dangle on the brink of a moral precipice).

But there is an alternate dynamic that’s equally intriguing, if not subtler in structure — the seemingly good character who cannot function in the world where he or she is placed. If the first type of conflict is the “what if” scenario, in which a reader can imagine what he might do given a similar set of circumstances, then the latter asks the reader to look at himself and admit truths about his life he might rather not.

The short stories in Yesterday’s Weather, by Irish author Anne Enright (who won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for The Gathering), fall between the two categories. The 31 stories, some old and some new, often place us right in the middle of a situation in which expectation is not quite matching with reality.

Take the opening story, “Until the Girl Dies.” The young mistress (“the silly twit”) of a middle-aged man has died in a car crash. Told from the point of view of the adulterer’s wife, the story is about reconciling the collision of blunt truths with long-held fictions. “If the girl had not died she would not have mattered in the slightest. She would have been a lapse,” the narrator tells us early on, before eventually having to face what “mattered” means.

Throughout the collection, we read mainly of women — mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends — having their social and moral expectations challenged. All set in modern Ireland, the stories in Yesterday’s Weather are domestic dramas, not the romantic fare about the absentminded postman in the quaint village.

There is no question or doubt about Anne Enright’s ability to write. Her deft sentences often contain a simplicity that is bonded by an amalgamation of irony, honesty and humor. In many respects, she is a terrific method actor, climbing under the skins of characters from all walks of life and all sets of circumstance, and bringing them voice. And while the stories often read more as vignettes, there still is a sense of completion about them, one that takes us into dozens of ordinary yet complex lives, and then challenges us to see ourselves within them.

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