In his first collection of fiction, Justin Cronin proves himself a deft chronicler of everyday American life. The eight connected stories in Mary and O'Neil find their nexus in the character of O'Neil Burke, who, in the beginning of the book, is a smart, amiable young man attending a pristine New England college.

After both his parents die while he's away at school, the touchstones of O'Neil's life — his wedding day, the illness of his sister Kay, a surreal visit to his childhood home — become tinged with puzzlement and grief. But his parents' death is also an unforeseen source of strength: later in the novel, watching his sister reading a book in bed with her sons, O'Neil reflects: "A piercing loneliness touched him, and he realized, with a start, that it wasn't his parents he was thinking of, or even Kay. He was thinking of his wife and daughters. He longed to hold them in his arms." Like a well-crafted poem, Cronin juxtaposes the narrative of O'Neil's life with the white space of his parents' death.

It is Mary who ultimately provides solace to O'Neil's grief and wanderlust. He meets her as a young woman while backpacking through Italy. Standing at a map behind Pitti Palace, she is amused by his broken Italian ("Dove siamo: Where are we?"), he by her charisma and tenacity. But it is their mutual sense of loss (she has given up a baby) that brings them together.

As Mary and O'Neil create a life together, what becomes apparent is their lingering sense of innocence. This is a couple whose accumulated loss has shadowed them into adulthood. Unlike the sharp-edged innocence of Holden Caulfield, however, their innocence emerges organically: through the measured and lyrical prose. In their early days as a couple, for instance, Cronin writes: "Their love was eclectic and sensual — O'Neil, for instance, sometimes placed his nose against Mary's cheek simply to smell her skin, or bathed in the water she had just used — and their lovemaking surprised them with its ease. So many years of nervousness; why had no one told them that sex was meant to be funny, and that they could say the things they wanted to and ask for what they liked?"

In another scene, O'Neil waits in a hospital, exhausted after the birth of his first child. Though it is nearing midnight, he dials the telephone number of his deceased parents on a whim. A woman answers, and believing O'Neil to be someone she knows, tells him to come home.