This isn't the place to develop theories of style, but I do think something's afoot.

When Phil LaMarche's American Youth came out in April from Random, I expected a lot of hoopla. It's a genuinely strange book that is also fiercely accessible, and when I read it in galleys last winter I had that feeling: this is one of those books that's going to change things.

Unless I missed it, I haven't seen any reviews that remark on the book as some weird new commercial realism, one that might actually be capacious enough to contain a host of contradictions --- about what American life in the exurbs is really like, and what audiences more attuned to movies, TV, the interweb, comics etc. expect from fiction, fiction that's post-Eggers earnest, post-Saunders ironic, post-Karen Russell girl-fantasiac etc.

I had that feeling again this week when reading Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work, a story collection that's due from Open City in November. It's by Jason Brown, someone of whom I'd never heard, despite a previous collection called Driving the Heart and Other Stories.

WTDCNEFHW doesn't have the "big book" feeling of American Youth, which takes on a hot-button gun control issue (kids accidentally shooting kids) as well as gentrification (as sprawl) and a vacuous, heavily mediated religious fundamentalism that seeps into the gaps in families, but Brown's book uses shifts in perspective to get at its working class rural Maine people and settings that, in a similar way I can't quite put my finger on yet, pushes its form in order to get a the contradictions in the characters.

I don't want to spoil it, but the opening story, "She," handles a forbidden love shoot 'em up by brushing up against all the expectations of guns n' families melodrama, and the necessary naivete of its personae, with a deftness that's as unsparing as it is tender. It made me stop and try to remember if I seen anything quite like it, and when I was sure I hadn't I kept reading.

Stylistic innovation in fiction doesn't get much play anymore, but it's still every bit as exciting as it was 85 or 250 years ago.