Extras in the movie of their own lives

The deliciously named Miranda July was the director and star of the acclaimed 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know. A series of interlocking suburban vignettes, on the surface it seemed a gentler version of Robert Altman's Short Cuts, narrated in July's sweet, sing-song voice. Her first collection of stories is the prose equivalent: unusual, disaffected, tremulously lovely, and it comes heaped with pre-publication accolades from Dave Eggars and David Byrne. July, on the accompanying website, sums it up thus: "The first word is 'it', the last 'triumphant'."

Despite her disingenuousness she has much to be exultant about. The outwardly ordinary lives, inwardly churning at an almost apocalyptic level of woe, that make up these 16 stories are nevertheless graced with a sure sense of comedy and lightness of touch.

In "The Sister" an older man is consistently asked by a colleague of a similar age if he would like to meet his allegedly luscious younger relative. The meeting does not transpire and the fantasy progresses; what is being manoeuvred is a vehicle for their own sexual relationship. A lonely secretary falls for the wife of her boss simply by hearing her voice on the telephone in "Ten True Things"; she engineers an encounter with her at a beginners' sewing class, but their immediate sense of intimacy is ruined by the secretary's revelation that she knows her husband.

"Mon Plaisir" focuses on a couple whose marriage has plummeted to an infantile low. In an attempt to find an activity to enjoy together, they apply to be film extras. Miming a romantic dinner a deux, the adult warmth and spontaneity missing from their real life returns. Once the camera stops running, they ruefully admit their relationship is over. As a character in another tale comments: "There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love, and they worked together to fill those rooms with mid- century furniture."

This is the one drawback of No one Belongs Here More Than You - the strikingly similar voice behind each story is interchangeable and can become monotonous in a few instances where the plot doesn't quite succeed. In "The Swim Team", the lack of access to a pool does not deter a young woman from instructing a trio of elderly novices to "swim" on her apartment floor; "Making Love in 2003" sees a nocturnal amorphous love object transformed into a 15-year-old special-needs student with whom his immature teacher is inappropriately close. Sometimes quirkiness such as this is too self- regarding.

Yet when it comes off, July is glorious, as in the finest story, "Something that Needs Nothing". Two female high-school graduates, friends since the age of six, abandon their requisite homes to share everything - a cockroach-infested basement, a sordid job servicing wealthy women - except one cannot get the other to show the slightest physical interest in her. Only when she becomes a performer in a peep show, bemused and bewigged, is there consummation, yet inevitably it is a hollow, short-lived victory: "I saw her in the clearing with a pistol and I knew without even looking that my hands were empty."

In the poignant "How to tell Stories to Children", a single woman at first reluctantly, then joyfully, becomes a surrogate mother to the daughter of two perpetually rowing friends; but "inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed" and when a family therapist becomes too involved in the set-up, the tables are turned, to her ultimate disadvantage. Like Lorrie Moore, whose merciless self- deprecatory writing this most obviously resembles, July peers into the void and dredges up beauty and hope: "It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise."

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