Inappropriate Behavior is full of unpleasantness. These are miserable, excellent stories, featuring conspiracy theorists, perverts, depressive psychopaths and uncontrollable adolescents. Bad things happen to good people, good people do bad things and bad people just keep on being bad.
Murray Farish is fascinated with the most sordid corners of American history, especially presidential assassinations: in "The Passage," a young man catching a ride to France in 1959 finds himself sharing a berth with an abrasive man named Lee Harvey Oswald; the narrator of "The Alternative History Club" is a young woman who believes she's seeing JFK's real killer everywhere decades after the assassination (hint: it's not Oswald). "Lubbock Is Not a Place of the Spirit" features a protagonist recognizable as would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley, Jr. The title story, which is also the best of the collection, focuses on more mundane dysfunction, as an underemployed father whose son has myriad undiagnosed behavioral issues watches his comfortable life spiral slowly, sadly away, one more casualty of the great recession.
Farish plays with stream-of-consciousness narration, sliding in and out of his characters' deranged psyches. The stories often begin with a straightforward recollection of events, then end on a disconcerting, surreal note. For all its darkness, though, this is a funny book. Farish sets out to prove that you don't have to be an optimist to be happy, nor do you have to be successful to be interesting. Inappropriate Behavior is America the beautiful, in all its ugly glory. --Emma Page, bookseller at Wellesley Books in Wellesley, Mass.