Friends With Benefits, but Without Illusions

DON’T BE A STRANGER, by Susan Minot

If you loved Miranda July’s “All Fours,” Knopf suggests, try Susan Minot’s “Don’t Be a Stranger.” How depressing. Minot is an O.G. writer of female desire who published the spare and potent “Lust and Other Stories” in 1989, when July was still in knee socks and Sally Rooney just a glimmer in Mr. Rooney’s eye. Its neon-lettered cover blazed from every cool girl’s bookshelf.

Minot’s 2002 novella “Rapture” took place during a single act of oral sex, a then-radical retort to the boys’ club of literary smut, the Brodkeys and Bakers. More successful was “Evening,” about a dying woman’s flashbacks, which she and Michael Cunningham turned into a Hollywood movie.

“Don’t Be a Stranger” lands more quietly than either of these works: an autumn leaf drifting to a pile on the pavement (leaves and trees are recurring motifs), but an intricately veined and gloriously colored specimen. Rather than a book you “can’t put down,” it’s one you might pause from precisely to prolong its mild suspense and poetic pleasures.

Even the main characters have a certain leafiness. The rule-averse, itinerant Ivy Cooper is a 52-year-old writer and divorced mother to a third-grade boy, Nicky, living near Washington Square Park in New York City after marrying in Tanzania and leaving his father, a solid but scowling do-gooder, in Virginia. (“Staying in one place was a challenge Ivy had not yet faced.”)

She falls into what is now known as a “situationship” with a 30-something musician named Ansel, like the nature photographer (he even occasionally picks up a camera), following a dinner party intended not so much to fix them up as throw them in each other’s paths. The dialogue there is quintessential New Yorker cartoon caption: “I’ve given up trying to quit,” a female guest says. “I’ve quit quitting.”