Julie Hecht’s collection of stories, “Do The Windows Open?” made my list of the best books I read in 1997. Here’s what I wrote in my end-of-the-year wrap-up:

If ever a book displayed impeccable tone, it’s Julie Hecht’s winsome, wry and steely “Do the Windows Open?” (Random House, $21). The nameless narrator of this group of connected short stories embodies a curious combination of fragile resilience and crisp, endearing wit. The world, demanding choices and implying judgments, is too much with her. Set mainly in East Hampton and Nantucket and heavily imbued with what the rest of us think of as Manhattanesque angst, the stories are, however, neither arch nor tedious; Hecht invests her narrator with such perfect self-effacement, delicacy and quirky intelligence that we trust her, if not love her, almost at first sight. Whether she’s trying to photograph an egotistical doctor with his dog or launching a quest to replace glasses frames from an optometrist she suspects of being a Nazi sympathizer, our narrator treads, in her sensible but pretty shoes, the touchy territory of hope and bruised innocence.

Now Hecht has published a second (and eagerly awaited by her coterie, which includes — included — me) collection of stories titled “Happy Trails to You” (Simon & Schuster, $24) and I am sorry to report that the book, far from exhibiting the impeccable wry, winsome, steely tone of its predecessor, is — and I never thought that I would write these words in a million years — petulant, aggrieved and wearisome. Quel disappointment!

The stories in “Do the Windows Open?” were gently satiric, verbally adroit yet oblique, resilient yet fragile, a constant weaving of optimism, pessimism and cluelessness. The stories in “Happy Trails to You,” on the other hand, have exchanged subtlety for complaint and quixotic punctiliousness for anger. The world is still too much with our still nameless narrator, but now she takes the situations she encounters personally and crankily. America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has become a different place from what it was when she was a child — quelle surprise! — and the blunt disgruntlement that fills these stories is depressing and narratively inept. Eleven years ago, the narrator’s nervous and neurotic nature seemed quirky and charming, almost a victorious function of her intelligence and privacy; now it seems querulous and ungracious and crippling.

She corrects people’s grammar in public. She explains things to people who don’t want things explained. She deplores “the horrible new century,” “this era of bad behavior” and “the new junk world of America,” and she remembers “an era of history and life that was so much more fun than the present one” and “the past decades of store service and just plain civility in America.” She points out “more evidence of the lack of education in the new, decadent, lazy generation” and “the new generation that knows only the music of the past couple of decades.” In two stories, she calls George Bush the “Alfred E. Neuman president.” In two stories she (being a vigilant vegetarian) mentions reading that a rabbi can ritually cleanse a stove upon which meat has been cooked.

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