Means’s first story collection, “A Quick Kiss of Redemption” (1991), is fairly traditional, but one can already feel him chafing at the surly bonds of realist norms. A native of Kalamazoo, Mich., Means imbues the world of “Quick Kiss” with winters on the snowmobile and summers on the lake; it’s a place where a loaded 12-gauge is just common sense, and the awe inspired by a set of train tracks is that they could take you “all the way to Chicago, or Detroit, depending on the way you go.” The later collections — the pathbreaking “Assorted Fire Events,” “The Secret Goldfish” (2004), “The Spot” (2010) and now “Instructions for a Funeral” — take us farther afield in place and time, but tend to return either to the Michigan of Means’s youth or to the Hudson Valley, where he now lives, and where down at the edge of the half-frozen river, “the soft shish of ice sliding over itself as the tide swept upstream, or down, became audible when the traffic noise on the road behind them subsided.” This is from the new book, from a story called “Farewell, My Brother,” and if the title echoes Cheever the characters are pure Means: railroad bums and wharf rats and other castaways whose lives have been shattered by violence, loss and chance. Means extends the profound empathy of his attention to those who need it most, even if they deserve it least, which must be why he writes so often about adulterers, criminals and teenagers.

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Like Flannery O’Connor, Means senses that beneath every act of violence there pulses a vein of grace, a redemptive potential yearning to be tapped. This is a central tenet — arguably the central tenet — of Christianity, reified at the Crucifixion, which, if you believe it, is the eschatological zero point toward which all prior history was aimed and out of which all future history emerges. And because one must never lose sight of that point, there is a perpetual turning back toward it even as the distance from it grows, so that the structure of time is no longer a line but a spiral. I don’t know whether Means “believes” this in the same way that O’Connor (a devout Catholic) did, but his commitment to exploring its implications is the rock on which his writerly project is built.

In a story in the new book called “The Ice Committee,” a veteran-turned-drifter recalls “how me and Billy-T found ourselves in the hot and heavy in Hue,” so they call for air support. “We hated them the way you’d hate any savior,” he says. “They saved your life and took it at the same time, if you know what I mean.” As it happens, the other drifters don’t know what he means (or if they do, they won’t admit it) but the reader does. This man survived the war, which anyway ended decades ago, but there’s a part of him forever imprisoned in that afternoon in Hue, a frightened kid saved and broken as his prayer for rescue is answered in the form of a flood of fire from the sky.

Means’s recursive, iterative approach links individual stories to one another within a given book and connects each book to the rest. The narrator of “The Ice Committee” seems to be Kurt from “Farewell, My Brother,” and Billy-T, who appears in both stories, is a character in Means’s 2016 novel, “Hystopia,” as well as the title story of “The Spot.” Two of the best stories in “Instructions for a Funeral” are historical: “Fistfight, Sacramento, August 1950” and “The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934.” The dryly descriptive titles have a precedent in “Railroad Incident, August 1995” from “Assorted Fire Events.” The trilogy is linked not by character or place, but rather by the American male tendency to seek self-definition in conflict, because it’s easier to do harm and be harmed than to abide in the vulnerability that love requires, or to admit that violence is only the failed exorcism of one’s own wild craving for oblivion.

“Instructions for a Funeral” is Means’s second collection to take an epigraph from William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All.” In “The Secret Goldfish,” we were warned that “The pure products of America / go crazy” — an axiom proved by any given Means story. The new book’s epigraph explains that “to refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force — the imagination.” This would seem to speak less to subject than to process, which is fitting, since this is Means’s most self-reflective and self-reflexive book to date.