The novella which opens David Haynes’ by turns hilarious and heartbreaking story collection Martha’s Daughter is written in the second-person POV, though not in the manner that’s become most typical in recent years.

This is not a set of instructions or a “how to,” and the “you” being addressed isn’t a character. Instead, the story’s narrator, Cynthia Garrison, a dyspeptic middle manager at the headquarters of the ominously named Synergy Enterprises, speaks directly to the reader, imagined, it quickly becomes clear, as a generic white observer — someone Cynthia, who’s African American, views with well-earned wariness and skepticism.

It’s a supremely deft way to put the reader on notice: This is a book concerned with how Black people tend to be viewed in America, the stereotypes and assumptions to which they are subject, and, perhaps, the possibilities for transcending them.

At the outset, Cynthia is already having quite a day. Her mother, Martha, has passed away after a long bout of dementia and an even longer bout of truly terrible parenting, which Cynthia has weathered only with the greatest effort. Now, she must go to the funeral home where her mother’s body has been taken and face this loss.

She would rather do it alone. But her coworker Janine, a white woman, recently hired and eager to climb the corporate ladder, insists on coming with her “to help.” Wishing to avoid the fallout an outright refusal would cause, Cynthia doesn’t say no. And so off they go together on this deeply trying errand, from which, by the time they get into the car, the reader is already very much doubting they’ll return unscathed.

One brilliance of these stories, which are set mostly in places — St. Louis, Dallas, the down-at-heel exurbs of Washington, DC — beyond the usual coastal suspects, is how they show characters at emotionally perilous moments without losing sight of either the absurdities people inflict on themselves or the big, systemic inequalities that makes some lives much harder than others.

From the absurdity comes humor but also poignance. In “Blind Alley,” a wife spends an excruciating evening certain that her homely husband is stepping out on her because that’s what all the men her mother was involved with did. And in “The Lives of Ordinary Superheroes,” the former sidekick to an aging crime-fighter known as Ghetto Man comes to say goodbye and apologize one more time for the decision that ended his mentor’s career.

Haynes writes sentences so sharp they could cut glass and descriptions that are both vivid and witty. On more than one occasion while reading, I laughed out loud. In the fall of 2025. This is saying something.

Haynes is also a skilled observer of intimacy and attachment in all their forms. He shows the reader the vast range of ways that people can care for and hurt each other, sometimes at the exact same time. Which is not to say that these stories don’t give love its due, only that they look at it with a rare degree of clarity. In particular, the way the mother in “Your Child Can Be a Model!” adores her moderately misbehaving son will stay with me for a long time. It’s a portrait of a love that is both self-aware and helpless, able to take pleasure in its own excess but also conscious of the need to protect its object against everything that’s likely to beset him in the years to come.

There are a few moments where the characters do and say things that seem designed to move the story toward a specific outcome rather than being an outgrowth of who they are. In “On the American Heritage Trail,” an elderly woman who has been dumped by her family in a crummy residence hotel doesn’t act in ways that show the “broad legacy of hurt feelings and broken connections” that caused her to be abandoned. And in “How to be Seen in Public,” it didn’t seem (to me, at least) entirely plausible that the white mother of a Black teenage son would be quite so blindsided by the microaggressions of her lefty colleague, as though she’s never encountered such a thing before.

Mostly, however, the stories in Martha’s Daughter are complex, trenchant, moving and very, very funny. They use humor to get the reader close to some big, upsetting truths, and they show people enduring and sometimes finding space to be who they are against the forces that would prevent it. Altogether, they are a great pleasure to read.

Emily Mitchell is the author of a novel, The Last Summer of the World, and the story collections Viral and The Church of Divine Electricity. She serves as fiction editor of New England Review and teaches at the University of Maryland.