The Collected Stories Lorrie Moore Faber & Faber, 672pp, £20

In the introduction to Collected Stories (1978), John Cheever regretted that the order of the stories was not reversed, on the grounds that "any precise documentation of one's immaturity is embarrassing". Thirty years later, Lorrie Moore has acted on the impulse that short-story writers often feel (but novelists rarely do) to distance themselves from their early work, by publishing her three collections, plus three stories recently published in the New Yorker and some free-standing stories from her novel, Anagrams, in reverse chronological order.

Moore's fans call her the best writer of her generation - the other, flashier contestants (with whom she was never associated in their heyday) might include Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz; detractors find her wit tiresome. If the typical Moore protagonist were to write a personal ad it could read: "Poetry-loving, cat-owning, musical-comedy enthusiast with gift for wordplay seeks conventional man to baffle with puns." She would place the ad in the London Review of Books, enjoying the arch futility of the exercise while wondering if she was losing her mind after too many years in the Midwest.

Lorrie Moore moved from New York to Wisconsin in 1984, and many of her heroines make similar moves. In "Agnes of Iowa", the eponymous heroine leaves New York for a slower existence: "I feel like I've got five years to live," she told people, "so I'm moving back to Iowa so that it'll feel like 50." Zoë in "You're Ugly, Too" is a New Yorker who teaches in Illinois. Her students are "spacey with estrogen from large quantities of meat and cheese" and rightly suspect her of mocking them. Although the Midwest is the subject of many enjoyable quips ("Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest," thinks another East Coast migrant), it is more than cheap clowning, as Moore's characters bring their unease with them and express it through wit. Wordplay is how they protect themselves in uncomfortable situations but it isolates them even more, just as Moore's flippancy risks alienating readers while conveying her characters' desperation in a way no other style would. The following exchange between a couple is the kind of groan-making miscommunication Moore's world is built on:

"There are lots of people in this world, Moss, but you can't be in love with them all."

"I'm not," he says, "in love with the mall."

Moore's first collection, Self-Help (1985), is a mostly one-note affair due to the imperative tone of self-improvement manuals that it adopts. The narrators are supposed to be addressing themselves, but after a while it's hard not feel it is the reader who is being hectored. However, opening lines such as "Understand that your cat is a whore and can't help you" are still arresting.

In "How to Write" a teacher of creative writing tells a student: "Some of your images are nice, but you have no sense of plot." The most notable development in Moore's work is her increasing ability to combine complex plots with a cast of characters who have experienced disappointment rather than been merely anxious about it. One of the best stories from her third collection, Birds of America (1998), is "Real Estate", in which Ruth has survived cancer but is unsure her marriage will survive her husband's affairs and her own lack of interest in sex: "The thought of taking her clothes off and being with someone who wasn't a medical specialist just seemed ridiculous." Her attempts to renovate a half-derelict house to give them something to talk about turn into something halfway between farce and a ghost story as the house is invaded by bats, squirrels, geese, ants, raccoons, crows and a 15-year-old boy. In counterpoint to Ruth's domestic struggle, Noel from the lawn company commits robberies at night and asks his victims to sing while he writes down the lyrics. As the surreal strands start to intertwine, Noel and Ruth's obsessions come to seem more normal than everyone else's placidity.

Much has been made of Moore's own obsession with illness: cancer is a recurring subject. However, she is less interested in the grim physical details than in examining how illness makes its sufferers helpless. Her characters' pun-filled resistance to helplessness in all its forms is an arch form of stiff upper lip (though this makes her work no less annoying to those who find archness unbearable). Bill in "Beautiful Grade" is an academic going through the kind of mid- life crisis that involves sleeping with graduate students. Suicide has its merits, he thinks, "a real edge on the narrative (albeit retrospectively), a disproportionate philosophical advantage (though again, retrospectively), the last word, the final cut, the parting shot. Most importantly, it gets you the hell out of there, wherever it is you are." But, as Lorrie Moore and all her hyper-aware characters know, a good pun will do exactly the same thing.

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