The title of this short story collection – Inappropriate Behaviour – is brilliant. Few of Irene Mock’s characters can evade the charge – certainly not, for example, the woman writing a novel (about her husband’s love affair) while her unsupervised children climb on the roof. Nor the newly divorced elderly man who interviews all 87 women who respond to his personal ad. Nor the writer who recasts a romance with a woman he meets on the beach into a tale of an encounter with a prostitute.

Mock, who came to Canada from the United States in 1972 and lives in British Columbia, is well established as a writer of fiction. Most of these 11 stories about men and women, or men, women, and children, bear the imprimatur of magazines like Grain, Capilano Review, and Fiddlehead. The title story of this first collection is one of several about Ellie, a perceptive young nurse in a psychiatric ward. Sharply observed and tautly crafted, it prompts the question: What is appropriate behaviour? The 21-year-old patient who is preoccupied with world tensions makes more sense than the health professionals who dress like advertising executives and worry about spin control. A sequel, “Rapture,” about a lawyer faking madness to dodge a criminal charge, makes dramatic use of the backdrop of the Gulf War but restates less successfully the themes of the first.

In other stories lovers woo and betray each other with art and fiction. At times these characters are vapid and self-absorbed, their dialogue self-conscious. The most powerful stories – especially those beginning the book – are about caring, duty and family, and the fragility of happiness. In “Firstborn” a woman in her final days of pregnancy learns she is carrying a monstrous child. In “A Small Ceremony” she and her husband scatter the child’s ashes (bones, in fact) in the company of a Japanese woman whose family perished at Hiroshima.

Mock’s characters negotiate between fear and desire, between deflecting fate and taking it on. In “Neapolitan” a father urges his despairing adult daughter to embrace life, nuts and all: “Go ahead,” he says, “go ahead.”