Thomas Morris’s second collection of short stories, the successor volume to his acclaimed debut We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, presents the reader with five studies of the longing to belong. A boy goes to his first Wales football game with his father, who no longer lives with him and his mum, in the year that Wales reach the semi-finals of the Euros and the boy and his mother lose their home. A seahorse tries to fit the lessons his father has taught him on to his own life, as he navigates a world that’s satisfyingly the inverse of our own, full of pregnant dads and absent mums. A frustrated office worker stuck in a dead-end job asks out his best friend by text, having run out of potential matches on Tinder; a young man travels round Croatia with his girlfriend, while trying to break out of the psychological isolation he blames on his father; and another goes to a backstreet dentist to get his teeth sharpened so he looks like a vampire, while his mother barely leaves the house after the death of her husband. The astute reader will have already discerned the presence of certain themes and archetypes achingly familiar to readers of fiction – this is a book filled with shy boys, distant dads, and men not able to connect with women.
The requirement of a writer choosing to work with such familiar material is that they do it very well, and this is what Morris has achieved. He articulates loneliness and the desire to feel connected to someone with great delicacy, subtly highlighting the early traumas that might make connection difficult. His work is interested in adolescence; moments in the development of his characters’ lives when something caused them to split off from the pack, or at least feel that they had done so, so that now their lives strike them as a kind of dream. The boy in the story Wales believes he can enter into other worlds, other realities (what child of divorce doesn’t?). The seahorse father in Aberkariad sticks doggedly to the story that his partner will come back to him one day, even though he knows it not to be true. The man in Little Wizard is struck by the feeling that “his hands weren’t his own”; the young man in Passenger is haunted by the idea that he’s not “the real him” now, that the past is the real world, and everything else is a kind of obscuring of it. For the protagonist of Birthday Teeth, “my own past feels like a fiction, like something that didn’t really happen to me”.
Morris’s damaged protagonists also frequently seem to be in the process of accruing new harm. There are very few positive relationships in this collection; a woman tells her friend he doesn’t respect women, and he responds by asking her out; a woman lies about her mother dying; a seahorse can’t move on from the memory of a mate who could not love him. Morris’s world fills up with disconnected figures, who can’t, as the title says, “open up”.
If there is a weakness in the collection it may lie in the seahorse story, Aberkariad, which seems slighter, and perhaps overextends its joke, while the other four pieces explore complex, nuanced moments with greater concentration. It’s also possible to quibble with Morris’s reading of our essential aloneness in the world as something to be sad about. Aloneness can also be freedom, and while his thesis – that connection with others is where we find meaning in life – is easy to get behind, there are many people who don’t find solitude as hollow as it seems in Morris’s stories. But then again, this isn’t a collection about all people. It’s a fine study of young men not quite living their lives.
• Open Up by Thomas Morris is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
