"Stay Up With Me," by Tom Barbash If your best friend has just had his heart broken, give him a copy of Tom Barbash's new collection of stories, "Stay Up With Me." Inscribe it: "Everybody in this book is worse off than you." Barbash's characters are lonely, unhappy and at least temporarily ruined. And yet there's something addictive about these stories - like potato chips or a stiff drink. Barbash is a true craftsman who sweats over every sentence, and that artistry makes you want to read the next story. Or maybe it's just schadenfreude, which, after all, gives classic tragedy much of its punch. For better or worse (probably for worse), we like to see other people in pain. And the people in Barbash's stories have many of the qualities that make us want to see them suffer. Most are extremely privileged, overeducated, upper-middle-class; they're usually New Yorkers; they're almost always spoiled. Take Timkin in "Balloon Night." He's holding his annual party to watch the cartoon characters inflate for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in his "three-­bedroom eighth-floor apartment, on West 77th Street between Central Park West and Columbus." But it's hard for poor Timkin to enjoy the party because he's afraid his friends will find out that his wife doesn't love him anymore. All of Barbash's characters accept some version of Timkin's way of life: they act and talk as if everyone lived that way, or at least ought to live that way, since it's the way the right kind of people live. When we watch Timkin humiliate himself in front of his friends, trying to hide the truth about the end of his marriage, we don't pity him. On the contrary, we think he had it coming. Another example: One night beneath a full moon, the mother of the young narrator of "Howling at the Moon" teaches her son how to do just that. But he practices this weirdly cool skill during four weeks at his mother's boyfriend's summer home "off the coast of Maine." God or lorazepam save us, we want to protest, from the self-­involved neuroses of whiny rich kids. Yes, we understand that he's grieving for the end of his childhood, finally accepting the fact that he'll never be as close to his mother as he'd like to be. Suffering is suffering; like smoke, it fills any room. But when the self-absorbed, lovesick 20-­something in "How to Fall," on a ski trip for singles in the mountains of Vermont, literally and metaphorically falls and falls again, the truth is we want to see her do it. These characters, like Oedipus and Antigone and Clytemnestra, really aren't like the rest of us, except - and this is the crucial part, this is why Barbash is worth reading - they hurt in precisely the same ways we do. Barbash, the author of "The Last Good Chance" and "On Top of the World," writes about people who are, as a taxi driver once said to me, "so rich they don't even know what money is." And yet Barbash isn't actually writing about money: the difference between rich and poor goes unnoticed here, as we suspect it does for most of the people who live this way. Money isn't their problem. It's not their solution either. They're in the same leaky boat, the same stormy waters, that frighten and imperil the rest of us. Improbably, despite your better judgment, you'll want to stay up with these characters. Barbash's stories reminded me of a ­really good A.A. meeting, one where the old-timers aren't showing off but the people who are genuinely in pain are tearing their hearts out, not giving a damn whether they're going to be judged or loved for it. Such people need to talk, they need to cry, they need to feel sorry for themselves, and Barbash lets them. That takes a lot of courage for a person and a lot of courage for a writer. I have only one complaint: Barbash repeatedly gives his characters a moment of relief in the final paragraph. I kept wanting to say, "Spare us the redemption." They don't deserve it, and we don't want to hear about it (especially not in the last paragraph). I remember once writing to a mentor of mine when I was in real money trouble. I'll always remember what she wrote back: "I know a lot of rich people. And they're all unhappy. I took a vulture's comfort in that. Clancy Martin's latest book, "Love, Lies and Marriage," will be published next year.