The grown-ups in Anik See’s half-dozen stories aren’t an especially admirable lot: they’re adulterous and alcoholic; they disappear and they disappoint. Existing at the narrative margins, they cast a shadow over the lives of their twenty- and thirty something children, who in response seem to cling to a protracted adolescence. These characters hold vague jobs, drift in and out of relationships, and fall back on cultural references—the opening credits of Six Feet Under, Being John Malkovich’s bizarre lounge scene—when their own observations prove wanting. Locked in a perpetual present, they have no problem answering Twitter’s pointed question “What are you doing?” (I am at a trance club in Toronto. I am living in a cabin on the Rideau Canal, having mediocre sex with a man who may or may not be married. I am stalking Mark Kingwell.) But damned if one of them has a clue what to do next.

These restless protagonists, then, are never moving toward anything in particular; they’re just escaping something else. In “Binary,” which opens the collection, the trance club provides a woman refuge from a troubled visit with her much older brother, a foul-mouthed screw-up given to thinking about little more than “the shortest distance between him and a drink.” In “Ice Out,” a painter must find a way to live within her means “after years of trying to make it as an artist in the city”; she selects the cabin on the Rideau Canal simply by opening a map, closing her eyes, and pointing a finger. And in “Kingwell,” the philosopher-loving narrator trades her downtown Toronto apartment for the rustic Calgary outskirts, mostly “to try [her] hand at hiding for a while, to see how it fit.”

See’s characters may have surfaced in their locations by accident or by default, but once there they’re anchored with precise and vivid prose. Though this is the author’s first fiction collection, two previous books of travel writing have honed her descriptive talents, and she conjures the mosque-scattered landscape of bustling Istanbul and the vast, empty Alberta horizon with equal ease. But See is after a deeper connection than carefully crafted vistas and existential angst, so she quietly and skilfully layers her protagonists with repeated gestures and traits. Two characters lack the confidence to successfully start an outboard; two others are haunted by a postulant’s ghost; two more attempt seduction by licking honey from proffered fingers; still two more confess that their fathers were best met with silence.

In the Toronto trance club, enveloped by pulsing music and violently bobbing heads, the protagonist senses some “collective power greater than all of our own put together, because everyone who is here is thinking the same thing, as individuals.” She seems to approve, but the cumulative effect of See’s connecting patterns is rather unsettling; we don’t much want to be robbed of our individuality or agency. Then, with her final and formally experimental story, the author offers a bit of salvation. Told in parallel narratives (one unfolding across the main page, the other in smaller print along the bottom), “Postcard” follows the long journey of an abandoned girl in search of intimacy. It’s a heartbreaker, but here’s the silver lining: We must decide where our eyes go and how we read this story. We are compelled, thank goodness, to choose what’s next.