Under what circumstances would you even say “Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine”? Maybe you are hurriedly dismissing an awkward question at a party. Or you are going through your post and noticing, sadly, that it is all speeding tickets and penalties for late bill payment. The question is at last resolved by the narrator of one of these micro-stories, recalling a dinner party. “How did all this end? Oh, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine.”

Williams has often been called an avant garde writer, but that doesn’t mean these stories are hard to read

It is fun to play with the music of this line in one’s head, trying out different stresses and rhythms. And what goes for the title line goes for much of the exactingly crafted prose here: American author Diane Williams is not going to chivvy the reader along with adverbs to explain tone and emphasis. Each story lasts half a page, one page, maybe three: it is a monologue, or a skewed fable, or an overheard conversation in a cafe. There are domestic scenes, comical relationship mishaps, exquisitely hinted pain, and funny titles – my favourite was “At a Period of Exceptional Dullness”. All this is evoked in miniature, with tremendous economy. So the reader is going to have to work out her own line readings. Williams has often been called an “avant garde” writer, but that doesn’t mean these stories are hard to read or unentertaining. What she is brilliant at, though, is making ordinary language seem newly strange.

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Often, these narrators are speaking very carefully, but in oddly shaped sentences – not the fluent syntax of fiction, but the broken syntax of everyone’s actual speech. This opens gaps for creative ambiguity. One woman says of a man: “He was obviously – I have tried not to focus on that quality.” We never learn what that quality is. “After all,” one of the few third-person narratives suggests, “hadn’t he tried to stop her buying one of the heaviest mattresses that she surely will regret purchasing.” Literally, this means that she regrets many mattresses, of which this is just one of the heaviest. Is that what Williams means? The fact that we can’t tell for sure is part of her deliberately wry humour.

Sometimes the meaning of two things at once seems to be the whole point of a story. Here is one, “The Poet”, in its entirety:

“She carves with a sharply scalloped steel blade, makes slices across the top of a long, broad loaf of yeasted bread for the dog who begs and there’s a cat there, too.

She holds the loaf against her breast and presses it up under her chin. But this is no violin! Won’t she sever her head?”

The last line could mean: gosh, this is a dangerous action to perform with a sharp knife, she should be more careful. Or it could just as well be an actual plea for the woman to decapitate herself. Below the surface of an apparently banal line of speech opens a chasm of potential horror.

A story evidently means something devastating but is so obliquely sketched the moral is left tantalisingly out of reach

More often, though, the chasm is one of comical misunderstanding or disconnection. A pompous man describes “the woman I had settled on to have intermittent leisure with – Evangeline. How clean she was and how calm.” A woman describes her husband: “the lineaments of his face are stamped with his best intentions whether he has any of those or not”. Occasionally there is an outright joke. “I’ll make no attempt,” says one narrator, “to explain a cat’s problems that are basic to all cats – schemes that are unrealistic.”

Who are all these people? They are the way they speak, the surprising ways they have of observing the world. (“A small object’s overall smallness on a shelf caught his eye.”) In what circumstances they are speaking, and to whom, is often mysterious. “Now I have fuzzy grey hair. I am pointing at it,” says one narrator – so she is not talking to someone who can see her. Another narrator declares: “I am a man, if that wasn’t clear before this” – so he must be writing rather than speaking.

Williams’s exquisitely deadpan method can result in a story that evidently means something devastating but is so obliquely sketched that the moral is left tantalisingly out of reach. Or it can produce something that just seems hermetic and odd. The experience of reading 40 of them in one volume is a bit like watching a comedy sketch show – the odd one might leave you stony-faced, but there’s another one along very soon. Given the variety of judgments that one little word can imply, a reader’s responses might well go, in turn: “Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine.”

• Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine is published by CB Editions. To order a copy for £7.37 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.