The short fiction in The Big Impossible explores guilt and redemption, aspiration and failure, and the stubbornness of modest hopes. The usual mileposts are fading, and choice is in the context of institutions and assumptions that are no longer holding steady. In "Clean," a man waits for inevitable justice to come, as much as it will play against him. In "House of Sully," a working-class family navigates the tumultuous year that 1968...