"Nine Inches," Stories by Tom Perrotta In Norman McLaren's classic short film "Neighbours," two well-dressed suburban men come to blows over a flower on their property line, the fight soon descending into meaningless savagery and mutual destruction. A parable of cold war violence, "Neighbours" shows how quickly peace devolves into chaos when people lose their heads: nobody wins. Tom Perrotta's new collection of stories, "Nine Inches," takes a similar tack, exploring moments of turmoil and rupture in the suburbs. Each story steps inside the lives of upstanding middle-class people - "the future leaders," a high school student says, "the good examples." These characters are fundamentally privileged, not just because they attend strong public schools in affluent neighborhoods or have decent careers, but because they belong to a community, with families and neighbors and friends. Unfortunately, they can't always hold on to their good fortune; instead, they behave like a high school teacher named Vicki, who "hesitated long enough to realize she was making a mistake, then kept going." A recurring element in the stories is the one wrong move a character makes - blowing off college applications, committing adultery - that turns an Edenic life into a postlapsarian hell. With a single misstep, a person can find himself alone, tunneling down into some underground economy, dealing drugs or cheating on the SATs. But the worst consequence of all, for Perrotta's protagonists, is to have lost their place in the social order of their hometown. That quirky, complicated, immensely rewarding community life, manifested in Little League games, middle-school dances and neighborhood socializing, is itself the most vibrant and fully developed character in the book. Though bad things happen, and marriages and futures go awry, Perrotta doesn't depict suburban anomie in the vein of Richard Yates. Rather, his portrait of the suburbs as an essential, if at times heartbreaking, facet of our modern lives marks him as the descendant of such chroniclers of small-town America as Thornton Wilder, John O'Hara and Willa Cather. In the best of the stories, the portrait is remarkably rich. The clear standout in "Nine Inches" is "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face," narrated by a home-plate umpire named Jack at a championship Little League game. The tone coasts from gentle irony (the Superior Wallcoverings Wildcats are facing off against the Town Pizza Ravens) to pathos as Jack provides a play-by-play of the game and of recent events in his own life. In the game, a conflict between the pitcher, Lori Chang, and the opposing team escalates to include her father, Happy. In life, Jack's failures as a father are legion. Instead of throwing himself into Little League, Jack's son grew up more interested in music and dance and eventually joined the Gay and Lesbian Alliance at his high school. "It's easy to say you should let a kid follow his heart," Jack muses. But what if his heart takes him places you don't want to go? Throughout most of the story, Jack's voice is Dockers-­casual, affable and self-­deprecating, until he describes the climactic fight with his son that has cost him his family. Then he admits: "I couldn't believe the little faggot had hit me." This carefully seeded moment of ugliness, set against the wholesome backdrop of a kids" baseball game, is not a matter of cheap contrast. Rather, Perrotta uses it to show how ordinary life contains both sweetness and violence; both are native there. A similar moment occurs in the story "Backrub," when a bright high school graduate about to leave for volunteer work in Uganda abruptly dismisses the orphans he was supposed to help. Like the father in Mary Gaitskill's "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," Jack is both remorseful and reprehensible. He can't entirely grasp how everything went wrong, much less articulate it to his family. Or, as Lori Chang's coach says of her pitching, "You can't know what's in another person's heart." Alix Ohlin's most recent books are the novel "Inside" and the story collection "Signs and Wonders."