How efficiently, for instance, Pearlman can compact a minor character: “Aunt Jan Flaxbaum met them there. The frequent result is a distinctive wittiness, a lightness and swiftness of tone familiar to readers of Muriel Spark (another writer interested in combining short views and long views). Pearlman’s fiction brings together, with uncanny wisdom, short views and long views: the hours of our lives and the length of our lives. It is the writer who sees everything, hears everything, and reserves the right to fiddle with the aperture. Pearlman’s new collection, “Honeydew” (Little, Brown), deepens this fascination with the “complicated world of adults,” and with the difference between seeing and understanding, though with the sober qualification that most adults see through a glass no less darkly than children. “So did she,” her mother replies, and the narrator senses that she has been admitted “abruptly into the complicated world of adults, making me understand what I had until then only seen.” “I thought she was his wife!” she says to her mother. Simon has committed suicide, and, from an obituary, that he is “survived by his mother,” she is surprised. In this case, though, death brings no understanding. Form, as so often in Pearlman’s stories, asserts itself as death: the moment when a life becomes fatally comprehensible. From her window, and with the help of binoculars, she fills her vision with the details of their lives-their furniture, their routines, the visits of their housekeeper-but without the knowledge to comprehend what she sees: they are shapes without form. In the title story of that collection, a ten-year-old girl spies on her neighbors, Mr. Pearlman’s stories have begun to reach a wider audience only since the publication of “Binocular Vision,” in 2011.

Then she becomes one of God’s spies, condensing a life into a few sentences, taking on the power of prophecy, knowing-as Psalm 121 describes the Creator-“thy going out and thy coming in.” But Pearlman can also move back from characters, in order to see the entire span of their lives. People are closely attended to and swiftly evoked amid the engrossing particulars of life-clothes, households, parents, children, dailiness of all kinds. Listening is, or should be, intimate, while spying is usually more estranged: Pearlman’s short fiction is interesting for the ways in which it combines proximity and distance.

Many of Edith Pearlman’s short stories involve characters who are listening to others or spying on them-the twin conduits, the detail-rich supply lines, of this subtle writer’s system. Photograph by Suzanne Kreiter / The Boston Globe / Getty Pearlman (at her home in Brookline, 2012) is at once a fabulist and a realist.

Binocular vision book by edith pearlman