Rebecca Lee's "Bobcat" - NYTimes.com I could spend this entire review pulling beautiful lines out of Rebecca Lee's textured and nuanced new story collection, "Bobcat." There are the piquant ones, echoing Flannery O'Connor: "In my experience, you would no more expect to find peace within a family than you would expect to find it in yourself." Or the perceptive descriptions, as pert as Lorrie Moore's: "She went twice a week to a tanning salon and bleached her hair frequently, so that it looked like radioactive foliage growing out of dark, moody sands." The collection has so many good passages - whole paragraphs that move into pages with never a misstep - that any linguaphile could spend a great afternoon in a little spasm of dazzle. But a story is more than a collection of words, and these seven long tales demonstrate Lee's prodigious talent for creating not just great lines but intricately structured, impressively plotted worlds. Lee has a longstanding interest in layers. Both here and in her 2006 novel, "The City Is a Rising Tide," she sifts through the sediment that builds over the course of a life - historical, familial, emotional. Her collection's varied characters have firsthand knowledge of topics like Soviet history, the plight of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong, architecture, Ceausescu, Roman and Judeo-Christian mythology. The layering of history and trivia with plot, with relational concerns, with the confusing jangle of existence, makes the stories difficult to summarize, a testament to their sneaky success. "The Banks of the Vistula" is, on its face, a cat-and-mouse game between a student who's plagiarized and the professor who catches her. But there are a few good twists. The plagiarized book is Soviet propaganda. The professor, who lived in Poland during the Soviet invasion and fought in Berling's Army, is immediately suspicious. The student's resistance to confession piques both his interest and his clever, understated wrath. It's a terrific setup, and I haven't even told you about the anorexic accomplice or the boyfriend with the deformed hand. But this story, like many of Lee's stories, does its best work deeper down, in the way it ties together its parts. The plagiarized book is about language, and the student has never before "stopped for even a moment to consider grammar, to wonder how it rose out of history like a wing unfurling." Soon she sees the profundity everywhere, even in the natural wordless world. Birds outside the classroom look "like ideas would if released suddenly from the page and given bodies - shocked at how blood actually felt as it ran through the veins . . . straining against the requirements of such a physical world." A disregard for the power of words becomes awe. Knowledge frequently begets awe in these stories. Lee's characters - university students, scholars, lawyers, architects, scientists - are nimble and verbal. But no matter how much information they hold about books, about law or soil science, it can't prevent those closest to them from remaining mysterious or unknowable. Such is the case in the title story. The narrator, a pregnant lawyer, has spent the day preparing, with her novelist husband, a terrine to serve at a dinner party. She drolly recites the steps: "Devein, declaw, decimate the sea and other animals, eventually emulsifying them into a paste," an activity that portends the evening's unlucky blending. This story, like so many in the book, gathers momentum through its rich associations. Over the course of the evening, the guests talk about the baby's nursery theme, a bobcat attack, spirituality, maternal expectations, infidelity, the bidding for Salman Rushdie's memoir, a Hmong immigrant's trial. There is a plot. One of the men they've invited is blatantly cheating on his wife. But ultimately, the story hinges on something more subtle, as the literal-minded narrator fails to extrapolate the correct meanings from a couple of complex situations. Many of Lee's characters are just embarking - attending college, falling in love, getting pregnant - and most confront a turning point. Compromise, so often linked to cynicism, gets a bad rap. But Lee allows her characters vulnerability and brokenhearted warmth that cracks our assumptions of what it means to settle, whether ideologically or romantically. She doesn't idealize the process. It's painful and shocking, but not without complicated rewards. In perhaps the most moving of all the stories, "Settlers," which closes the collection, a woman at another dinner party watches images of the levees breaking in the Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina as the baby that should be gestating inside her slowly dies. The story's action is mostly psychological, and it ends with the mother talking to the infant she will never meet about the beauty it will miss. There are large turning structures - Ferris wheels - that will carry people high into the air above the ocean, that is true, and then around the next corner there are fun houses, those are great. But in a moment of honesty, she balances the sweet with the bitter: "Then you grow up and you get a wonderful man and he cheats on you, or you get somebody like Bryan, who at your wedding says this as his vow - "I will be your teacher and you will be my team." " There's release in the lack of purity, the admission of imperfection and mandatory sadness. And there's a secondary release, too, for the mother, for the reader: language used even when it's futile, as a bridge across great swaths of mystery and sadness, a bridge you can stand on for a little while as you make your way across. Robin Romm is the author, most recently, of "The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks."