Recommended

The characters in Timothy Westmoreland's exceptional debut, Good as Any: Stories (Harcourt, $24), have nowhere to go but up, though they tend to go further down. In the title story, the funniest of the lot, Mitch must choose between Rose Marie, his beloved English bull terrier, and Delilah, his saucy and severe girlfriend. Delilah issues a sweet "fuck you" on her way out the door, but like many of Westmoreland's embattled characters, Rose Marie contracts a lengthy, debilitating illness. In "Darkening of the World," which appeared in Best New American Voices 2001, Straw, a laid-off paper millworker, wakes up laughing every morning, which is a real problem for his egghead roommate, a philosophy fanatic named Pork. Pork sounds like a self-help guru when he declares that Straw's laughing is proof that "you're forfeiting yourself, your Being toward death, your realization of your potential." Then the philosophy kicks in: "You need some dread. Some real nothingness." When Pork goes out of town, Straw has to take care of his roommate's fawned-over dachshund, Heidegger, who ends up bearing the brunt of all the disappointment in that house. The human sufferers in Good as Any will themselves into obsolescence or effect a silent, ruminative defiance, like Murphy in "Strong at the Broken Places," whose spooked friends don't know how to help him die. Just the kind of book reading you wanted to attend on a Friday night, right? But Westmoreland imbues his stories with enough sly humor and hope, however muffled, to make his characters' sad fates fascinating and unexpectedly illuminating. Westmoreland, who grew up in Dallas, will be at Barnes & Noble Arboretum on Friday, February 15, at 7pm.