A graceful debut captures the banalities and blessings of ordinary life

Small towns get a bad press in the UK. In the US, they are the setting for the nation’s idealised vision of itself: collections of Main Streets, mom-and-pop stores and picket fences, in which neighbours lend each other cups of sugar and everyone is on nodding terms with the sheriff. Here, though, we prefer to identify with thrusting metropolises or chocolate-box villages, and small towns are consigned to a dreary no man’s land between the two. They exist in the popular imagination as drab, deindustrialised zones of dead-end jobs and boarded-up high streets, where the schools are on the slide and the young people either get out or give up. Occasionally, there’s a move to romanticise their mundanity and view them as somehow more authentically British than the villages or cities. Speaking as a small-town girl myself, I’d say the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Small towns can undoubtedly be insular and claustrophobic; they are, of course, ecstatically boring for anyone between the ages of 14 and 21. But they’re also comfortable, dependable and unshowy – and just as capable as anywhere else of producing moments of grace.

Thomas Morris captures all of this in his debut collection. Although he has lived in Dublin for the past decade, he was born and raised in Caerphilly, and it is in his hometown that these stories are set: his granular familiarity with the place gives them texture and plausibility. He conjures Caerphilly beautifully, using his characters’ various viewpoints to create an overlapping montage of its streets and vistas and the crumbling castle at its centre, and subtly drawing attention to its limits through his use of definite articles. His characters talk about “the computer shop” or “the Total garage” in the confidence that we’ll know where they mean, because a town this size only has room for one of everything.

Over the course of 10 stories he assembles a cast of characters who are mostly drifting on the ebb tide between youth and middle age. Post-school or university but pre-children, they’re free, in theory, to do whatever they want, but they are united by the uneasy awareness that their options are steadily narrowing; that unless they act soon they’ll be reabsorbed by the town and subside into unremarkable middle age. The teacher living on the new build estate worries his wife is losing interest and embarks on an ill-conceived fitness regime; the ex-council employee surfs job sites and begins, half-heartedly, to fall for his neighbour; the young man working his final shift at the video rental store reassures himself that he’s “not desperate yet”. Even those who appear on the surface to have made a success of things (the man celebrating his impending wedding with a stag trip to Dublin; the woman home for Christmas from Edinburgh, where she works on a newspaper) are aware, despite their apparent forward motion, of their averageness. You can take the kids out of Caerphilly, in other words, but Caerphilly will do its best to pull them back in.

All of which creates an unmistakable whiff of social Darwinism; the suggestion that birthplace is somehow fate. In fact, Morris uses his small-town setting to flag up a universal truth: that most of us, wherever we come from, will live ordinary lives, and that it’s at the moment when youth fades out that we come face to face with it. If that sounds depressing – well, it is, a bit, and Morris doesn’t shy away from that: there’s a bitter ring to many of his tales. But he also offers consolations. The father of the boy on the stag do comes to Dublin armed with a guidebook and a digital camera – a model for the pleasures of middle age; the pensioner who, despite losing two wives, is back on the dating scene shows that life is long and there’s room for joy at every stage of it. The narrator of the penultimate story, “How Sad, How Lovely”, recalls how, “seeing a small kid push his own pram through the shopping centre, I felt giddy and started weeping with tingling joy. I had to hide in the magazine aisle of WHSmith until I calmed down.” It’s an image that calls to mind WB Yeats’ poem “Vacillation” for its mix of banality and blessing, and it’s Morris’s collection in a nutshell. Ordinary life is all we have, these stories tell us, and it’s tedious and glorious and meagre and marvellous – and worth celebrating.

• We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris (Faber & Faber, £9.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaG5nnqTDcH2TaK6eZZSku7V5yqemsGWnna61edaeqZ5llKS2r7OMrZ%2BopZGoeq670augrGWimsOqsdY%3D