In “Cosmos,” for example, a schoolteacher responds sympathetically to her boyfriend’s 8-year-old son’s confession of wrongdoing: “‘Tell me you’ll fix it before I tell you’ he says … Such a large, all-encompassing request, but why not try? To have an automatic guarantee, no matter what, that the other person would do what you wanted … After childhood, who would dare ask?” Jason’s confession recommits the protagonist to her relationship even as she realizes that not only Jason, but also his father and she herself, have failed each other in different ways. In the title story, the protagonist attempts to protect her sister, her niece and the daughter of her sister’s boyfriend from the threat of violence implicit in the sexual negotiations of a ski resort holiday. These characters are rewarded for their efforts with visions of beauty arising from chaos. The schoolteacher in “Cosmos” reflects on the long-ago death of her boyfriend’s parents: “What could it have been like, to fall out of the sky over Anchorage, Alaska, into endless drift of snow? For a few seconds there must have been such color in the air: the engine sparking; detritus blown like confetti, far and wide; a free fall of bright winter clothes.”

When the characters and situations are less fully imagined, the recurrent revelations of betrayal can seem tired. “Going Home with Uccello,” for example, remains the trite summary its protagonist imagines: “This going-with-your-sometimes-girlfriend to beautiful Italia for a romantic rendezvous in the fall and flirting with whoever got your attention in a shop that sold reproductions of the old masters.” At her best, however, Beattie surrounds her moments of heightened perception with unexpected details that compel our sympathy and belief. The brief, humorous “The Four-Night Fight,” for example, evokes the arbitrary suddenness with which a relationship can descend into conflict: “In the seconds preceding the fight, she had been perfectly happy, scooping the center out of a cantaloupe. Henry had become diabetic, so they no longer had cookies for dessert, only fruit. She kept a package of Chips Ahoy hidden behind boxes of Tide in the laundry room, but she’d lost her taste for sweets, suddenly.”

Beattie’s fictional landscape is often a bleak one. But the stories are worth reading not only for their lacerating evocations of baby-boomer anomie, but also for the moments of revelation she occasionally, but ungrudgingly, offers.

Fans will recognize, in this opening cocktail of Baltimore, frayed family ties, and the fateful encounter of strangers, the simultaneously mundane and magical world of Anne Tyler. They may find, however, that in “A Patchwork Planet” the mundane overwhelms the magical. Tyler’s 14th novel is narrated with wry bafflement by 29-year-old Barnaby, whose life has gone off the rails since he was caught robbing neighborhood homes as an adolescent. A true Tyler protagonist, Barnaby seeks out the detritus of human relationships rather than looting stereos and jewelry: “Back in the days when I was a juvenile delinquent, I used to break into houses and read people’s private mail. Also photo albums … I sat on the sofa poring over somebody’s wedding pictures.” To the despair of his distant father, his social-climbing mother, his chilly ex-wife and his prematurely patriarchal brother, Barnaby now works for a company called Rent-a-Back, doing odd jobs for elderly clients.

He also waits, without much hope, for a visitation from the Gaitlin angel. It was such an angel — a “big, tall woman with golden hair coiled in a braid on top of her head” — who first suggested to Barnaby’s great-grandfather the invention of the wooden dress-form that made the Gaitlins rich. We know that Barnaby will find his angel, though perhaps not where he first looks; we also know that his search will lead him through family crises and reconciliations. Indeed, the theme and action of “A Patchwork Planet,” as in all of Tyler’s novels, can be summed up in Barnaby’s reflections on how “these family messes” are temporarily resolved: “The most unforgivable things got … oh, not forgiven. Never forgiven. But swept beneath the rug, at least; brushed temporarily to one side; buried in a shallow grave.”

In “A Patchwork Planet,” however, the shallow burials and exhumations of the familiar Tyler types — the passive, lovable loser man, the provocatively undernourished girl, the less-than-loving mother — seem more mechanical than epiphanic. The characters are exasperatingly, rather than charmingly, quirky: As Barnaby misses one more appointment or confesses to having once attempted to torch his parents’ house, the reader may share his family’s annoyance. Tyler’s best novels, such as “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,” hit their targets — her readers’ hearts — with a gentle but satisfying jolt. They expose the damage done by familial negotiations, but insist on the possibility of consolation. “A Patchwork Planet” diverts, but its characters’ wounds don’t go very deep, and their recoveries fail to inspire.

To this end, Wolfe used both polling statements and interviews to elicit responses to hot-button topics (e.g., welfare, immigration, family structure, homosexuality) in a cross-country survey of 200 “middle-class” suburbia dwellers with family incomes well above the poverty line and well below Fortune 500 status. These responses, Wolfe claims, challenge the pessimistic view, fostered by polls, of a country riven with cultural conflict. His results led him to conclude instead that “the new middle-class morality … is more accommodating, pluralistic, tolerant, and expansive than either [the right or the left] has recognized.”

Wolfe emphasizes he defines his “middle-class” sample less by household income than by an adherence to a moral code of self-reliance, obligation to family and commitment to people and values outside themselves. He seems, however, uninterested in responses that might raise this notion of morality above platitudes. For example, he quotes one firefighter’s endorsement of school prayer: “It doesn’t take very long to say a prayer for anybody. And you could have a Muslim prayer, a Hindu prayer, and a Catholic prayer, and a Baptist prayer. You know, you could have all four of those in the span of five minutes and then go on about the day’s chores.” There’s something moving but also incoherent in the slap-happy pluralism of this guy’s call for spiritual observance based on the supposition that religion is neither meaningful enough to create conflict nor demanding enough to interfere with the day’s real work. But for Wolfe, it simply supports his sanguine conclusion: “For the American middle class, religious diversity is here to stay … the acceptance of so many different kinds of belief in America is remarkable.”

Like Candide, the figure of blind optimism satirized by Voltaire, Wolfe implies that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” “One Nation, After All” is an essentially conservative recommendation to stay in our gardens and cultivate “morality writ small.” Wolfe’s middle-class America, characterized by “quiet faith” and “modest virtues,” paradoxically provides “a set of values capacious enough to be inclusive but demanding enough to uphold standards of personal responsibility.” Homosexuals and supporters of bilingualism form a strange pair of pariahs at this tea-party, but you don’t have to be gay or an immigrant to find Wolfe’s celebration of the golden mean depressing. Passion, politics and idealism seem to have no place in this utopia of middling virtue.