The tender, raw stories in Shannon Cain’s The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, winner of the 2011 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, chronicle anomalous behaviors in a treacherous world. Cain portrays characters living outside the margins in places where convention loses all meaning. Jarring moments in the present connect to deeper emotions in the past. Discontent leads to suffering, sometimes to happiness. In Cain’s able hands, resilience and wit lock hands with desire and danger, illuminating the quixotic, sensual nature of our existence.

Cain’s work challenges both the tedium and the enormous tension of self-fulfillment. Characters come to unforgettable life in just a few pages. In the title story, a woman escapes from a stifling existence and a failed relationship to a sexual utopia where men and women share—everything. Monogamous relationships don’t exist; bisexuality is the norm; compassionate care is a given. Yet there’s trouble in paradise, a little word curiously free of children and oldsters. The seeming stability of the bisexual and heterosexual relationships shatters because, unbeknownst to Lisa, the protagonist of the story, it’s all a frolicking, libidinous break from the call of duty. When the elders and the children return, this paradigm of paradise crumbles, and Lisa, despite her efforts to remain in her new life far from civilization, must reconfigure her life.

Cain’s prose style revels in naturalist candor, and in some cases there’s a Carver-like quality to her work. In “This is How It Starts,” Cain simultaneously binds and severs identity and gender in a fleeting minimalist fashion. There’s a girl, and the girl splits her time between her girlfriend and boyfriend until she is forced to choose. The refusal of attachment, not the loss of it, leaves the girl pregnant, discussing the situation while on the phone with her mother: “‘You’re not ready,’ her mother says. ‘Live a little, I say.’”

The recurring theme of gender and sexual identity plays out PETA-style in “The Queer Zoo,” where Bixby, one of the bonobos in captivity, fails to engage in bisexual behavior. Cain parallels this sexual incongruity with that of deception. Sam, a cage cleaner at the zoo and occasional grant writer, hides his hetero life, although there’s “no actual policy at the Queer Zoo against hiring straight people.” He passes his girlfriend off as his sister only to find that everyone has known all along—a delightful flip on our nascent ability to accept sexual differences. But Cain is not content to tug at sexual diversity. The true complication is not based in acceptance; it’s found in action, and Sam liberates the deviant bonobo from captivity to spare her further scrutiny and study. This grand gesture resonates with the power of the romantic declaration it is, for Sam wants nothing more than to live with the sure and certain knowledge that reaching for something is not a distraction, but rather the adventure of life itself. Cain leaves us with the picture of Bixby in the passenger seat, Sam driving off into the desert, and the words, “How easy it is…just to let go.”

There’s a deeply humorous streak in these stories. We meet a mother who grows pot to pay off her credit card bill; a pillar of a small community who gets caught masturbating in the steam room at the local YMCA; and two bored office workers who reply to the all-too-familiar scam emails requesting money. We laugh, and then Cain sticks the needle in. The pot-growing mother must confront the actions of her law-abiding daughter; the woman who pleasures herself is blown apart by her daughter’s revelation about an incident with a swim coach; and the two office workers are saved—by the generosity of parents who’ve been lied to in a scam within a scam that reveals something finer than love.

Cain serves up an abundance of rich irony and amazing grace. As one of her characters says, “I’ve always wanted to be implicated.” The Necessity of Certain Behaviors implicates all of us— we are the anomalies Cain writes about. We are the anomalies she writes to. Admit it, and get in the car with Bixby the bononbo. It’s a great ride.