A few of the stories are set in bygone eras: “Conversation” gives us late-1960s women awkwardly attempting a consciousness-raising session: “In time it will be revealed that Sara is the one woman among them with a graduate degree, and that though she had once believed this would elevate her above the noisy din, the degree did nothing more than require her to waste a few years in Boston, prolonging the inevitable.” These women from the past are trapped much more overtly than the women of our present era — for them, “the inevitable” is a lot more so. “The Blue Hour” has two women striking up a friendship in circa-1960s Rochester, N.Y.; the friends eventually lose touch, “but that was not so unusual in those days when a woman stayed in a place only until her husband’s next transfer.”

By reaching across time, the book presents a bracingly pessimistic, even bleak, vision. The mothers of the past were trapped, it says, and so are the mothers of the present. There’s no way out; in fact, it’s probable that the mothers are setting up their daughters to be trapped in their own cycles of yearning. It’s as if Walbert has revised the final stanza of Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”: “Mother hands on misery to mother. It deepens like a coastal shelf.” Inevitable misery, in these stories, is mitigated by intense, transcendent love — love of children.