It’s becoming harder than ever to feel that we have any control over the world beyond the personal, the individual, the immediate. The television and internet give us access around the world, but filtered through pixels and color bars it only makes us feel that much more powerless in Suburbia, and it either turns us apathetic or it turns us mad. Such is the theme of Lucy Corin’s second-to-last story, “Mice,” from her collection The Entire Predicament, published by Tin House Books.

In “Mice,” the narrator tries to catch the rodents infesting his house as humanely as the narrator’s wife tries to fix the world she sees falling to ruin on her computer screen. It’s no surprise that both are ineffectual, nor is it any surprise that in trying to fix the world around them, their marriage—that is, the only thing they might have the capacity to fix—suffers in analogous fashion, as if in sympathy for their vain efforts, their hollow projects.

“Mice” reminds us that it’s often the smallest things that can throw our lives into disarray, and that sometimes the only way to avoid losing control is to relinquish it beforehand. I don’t imagine it’s any coincidence that the narrator at the end of the story finds himself on an airplane, his house yielded to the mice, his wife and child yielded to underground revolutionaries. “From within the pointy airplane I pushed through the world,” he says, and it reminds us of the first story in the collection, “Airplane,” in which the narrator counsels the Marine sitting next to her to just let go as the airplane they’re on falls from the sky. “I take his hand. I just do. ‘Picture we’re on a roller coaster,’ I tell him.”

Some stories succeed and others, like the characters in “Mice,” fail, but none can be accused of apathy, of not trying to broaden the reader’s scope of effect and affect on the world around them. Corin’s characters seem to walk around in a dream, in a daze, like a thirty-something Alice Through the Looking-Glass, writing a love letter to her dentist during a sniper’s rampage in “My Favorite Dentist,” or an encyclopedic romp through mechanical apparatuses in “Some Machines,” which recalls the wonderful inventiveness of Milan Kundera’s “Words Misunderstood.”

“So it’s not like nothing ever happens to me,” Corin writes in “Wizened.” “In fact, things continue to happen, which, it turns out, is a potential problem when it comes to settling on a way of life or a sense of truth regarding one’s ideology,” and there’s the rub: how to be an island with the world’s castaways washing up on your shores every hour on the hour?

Some stories sputter and some stories spark, but in all there are moments of adoration—of people and words, of moments and words, and of familiarity—with people and moments and words, of course. In “Mice,” Corin writes, “One thing I know from the past: if the blood and guts are from someone you love, there is nothing disgusting about them.” In The Entire Predicament, Corin doesn’t hesitate to lay out all the blood and guts of her characters, and it’s a testament to her skill that sometimes we want to scoop it all up, all the blood and guts and viscera, and try to stuff it back inside.