Funny and sweet, ‘Float Up, Sing Down’ is perfect for Elizabeth Strout fans

A teenager growing up in Reagan-era rural Indiana, Greg Cullen didn’t like the “old names.” Instead, he preferred “names like Michael, Kevin, Amy, Michelle, John, Rich, Kim, Brian, Tina, Greg and Tod. Names like Turner, Myrtle, Wilma, Ethel, Emerson, Winnifred, Virgil, Ruby and Zorrie made him feel like he had tripped at the cemetery and couldn’t stand back up, like the skeleton with the scythe was getting ready to impale him or at least put him in a joint lock.”

There are plenty of old and new names — and the everyday loves and losses connected to them — in the 14 linked short stories that make up Laird Hunt’s wonderful “Float Up, Sing Down.” Set on an early summer day in a small town in farm country, each story is told from a different resident’s perspective. Candy Wilson is getting ready to host the Bright Creek Girls Gaming Club but has forgotten to buy paprika for her famous deviled eggs. Myrtle installs an above-ground swimming pool under the shade of her honey locust as “grandchild bait.” Della Dorner tells her mother she is off to her job at the Galaxy Swirl ice cream shop but instead steers her Schwinn five-speed to a barn to meet up with Sugar Henry, who has brought along a package of Kraft Singles to use as a G-rated sex toy.

Della’s grandfather, Hank Dunn, is a retired sheriff and is intent on getting over to the Galaxy Swirl to give Sugar a piece of his mind about the “get-naked games” that are now the talk of the town. But first, he has coffee at the local diner and then climbs up to the roof of the corn bin on his 160-acre farm. “He’d sold recently, so the big chamber underneath him was empty. He smacked down his open hand and the whole thing rumbled like last night’s storm.” Sitting there, Hank muses about romantic interests that didn’t pan out and appraises the land unfurling below him. “God’s country,” he thinks. “Or God’s cousin’s country, anyway. Maybe God’s nephew. No need to get grandiose.”

In Hunt’s hands, details like these — often described in delightfully wacky streams of consciousness — serve as jumping off points into life’s ups and downs, from growing older to unconsummated crushes to feeling “big on Jesus for a while” to the pain of being a woman whose tastes run in “a different direction” in the days before every city had a Pride celebration. The Gipper gets several mentions, which is fitting for a book that is also a delicately stitched sampler of Americana.

The separate stories are subtly connected, like the rings of a stone skipped across a still lake. As the associations build and cohere, you feel Bright Creek more viscerally, both the way it can suffocate from gossip and also lift up the lonely through daily waves and hellos. At times melancholy, at times laugh-out-loud funny, “Float Up, Sing Down” is a celebration of the universes contained in the everyday. If you are a fan of Elizabeth Strout’s depictions of rural Maine, you will love Hunt’s openhearted yet wry take on this small corner of Indiana.

Elizabeth Foy Larsen is the author of “111 Places in the Twin Cities That You Must Not Miss.”

Float Up, Sing Down

By: Laird Hunt.

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 207 pages, $26.99.