A certain playfulness characterizes much of the new generation of Canadian short fiction, and Vivette Kady’s debut is no exception. These stories progress swiftly, in clipped passages linked by white space, so that one can almost watch the author’s mind at work, shaping and shifting as she chooses what to cut or keep. As a result, the authorial voice of Most Wanted is far more prominent than that of any of its characters, even when the stories are narrated from the first-person perspective.

But this is often not a bad thing. Kady’s prose is smooth and precise, if somewhat risk-averse, and her voice flickers with a sharp but compassionate wit. Indeed, the tension between sharpness and compassion informs these stories at every step. Take the opener, the Journey Prize-shortlisted “Anything That Wiggles.” Although the narrator’s family – a mother slowed by a fall in infancy, a grandmother who dies watching The Price Is Right, a domineering aunt who’s an esthetician, and a cross-dressing widower playing dad to a flock of pigeons – may seem ideal fodder for satire, Kady’s attempt to wring poignancy from this comic band, while not entirely successful, at least demonstrates an admirable distaste for the expected.

Kady is at her best when taking familiar scenes of romantic and familial dysfunction and infusing them with vivid detail and an impeccable sense of pacing. But while successful on this literal, anecdotal level, these stories frequently falter metaphorically, at those moments when the voice sidesteps the narrative to draw explicit connections.

Granted, this doesn’t happen very often, as Kady generally lets the bare stories resonate, but it does jar, for instance, that of the dozen or so metaphors in the book, a good many fall resoundingly flat. This tenuousness of comparison is exemplified by “The Bending Moments of Beams,” where the structural calculations of the architect narrator become an unsatisfying analogy for the strains of romance. Here, as elsewhere, the metaphor just seems cobbled on.

So Most Wanted, while well plotted, readable, and full of interesting people, lacks that commitment to the figurative that, while always risky, often makes good stories great.