I often can’t help but feel experimentation should be the spice, not the main course. Aaron Schneider enhances his stories skillfully in What We Think We Know using fairly moderate amounts of experimentation. Sex (in “The Cara Triptych”) has footnotes, detailing the stray thoughts and emotions typically washed away in all the surrounding moments.

In “Tuesday: All Day” (which vividly brings the life a day in the life of a teacher) an ongoing series of statements the teacher declines to add are crossed out and a long, awkward conversation he’d been dreading with a plagiarizing student goes without actual dialogue, putting the emphasis on what are basically stage directions: “[SILENCE].” At the same time, some of his students are the “jellyfish of culture,” in that “They are incapable of self-directed motion, but pack a vicious sting.”

Another favourite of mine was “The Death and Possible Life of Daan de Wees” which illustrates the way we survive in fragments of memory with the bald, unadorned statements about a grandfather in bold followed by less certainty: “Did they pack their lives into a set of steamer trunks given to them by a relative or into a handful of mismatched, second-hand suitcases with battered corners and latches Daan wired shut to be safe?”

In “Weather Patterns,” the way people move together and apart (and make use of each other, it could cynically be said) is blended with weather and the landscape. Schneider can both pile on the detail and keep the pace moving briskly along, as in this moment a woman leaves her apartment during an ice storm: “She yawed wildly along the sidewalk. Her hands slid off ice-slicked cars, deformed parking meters, the handle of a door that had doubled in size. She didn’t even make it to the end of her block before she turned back.”

And while it’s often ignored, the reality of climate disaster makes an appearance here when storms saturate the grounds in the mountainous coastal states of Veracruz and Tabasco, Mexico. With the soil incapable of absorbing anything, “more than a meter of rain falls in a few days, causing flooding and landslides, and washing crocodiles into the streets of Villahermosa.”

Unfortunately, I’m quite confident this part of the story isn’t made up, and it’s entirely believable it barely made the news in Canada. A character “pauses to imagine a slope shifting. Vague. Brown. Too broad to be fully grasped. Breaking free. Its weight gathering into a terrible momentum.”

If skill with language is an important ingredient in a worthy writer, far-sightedness and an ability to filter out the less relevant is perhaps equally important. This is a book that’s a potent and careful examination of life at the moment, and it comes highly recommended.