Kent Nussey’s new collection of stories, The War in Heaven, explores the emotional state of gender warfare from the male point of view. The seven short stories and one novella in the book are populated by women who ditch their loyal mates in favour of high-powered careers and men with ponytails. Bewildered and jealous, the rejected males spend most of their time floundering hopelessly after elusive ex-wives and indifferent girlfriends.

Cliff, the protagonist in the story “The End Of All Our Sorrows,” is a depressed potter who crashes his ex-lover’s all-female gathering and, in a bizarre gesture of desperation, holds an empty pot he has made out to them in an unexplained offering. In a similarly unstable move, Bremmer, the recently divorced main character in “A Night in Tunisia,” drops by his ex-wife’s house unannounced and insults her new lover until he is put under citizen’s arrest and forced to wait for the arrival of a (not insignificantly) female police officer. Rosemary, the subject of the title novella and two preceding short stories, is a tragic vamp seen through the eyes of her various lovers. The male protagonists focus on this damaged femme fatale (an undeniably compelling figure) and her “far-fetched life” with a disturbing and ultimately alienating obsessiveness.

At best, Nussey’s stories are moving and mysterious narratives of men trying their best to preserve a place for their own masculinity in a world where women seem to have no use for it. At worst, his prose suffers from wordy sentimentalism: “She has become both the metaphor and the thing itself: the body of a specific hunger and the final figure in a paradigm that denied and squelched my faith.” Too often the reader can feel Nussey’s authorial hand labouring for effect, intruding and instructing us what to think. Fortunately, however, his engaging characters occasionally break through to suggest something of their very own.