“Doesn’t everybody want to learn, to explore,” one narrator asks in Diane Williams’s 12th collection of often very short stories . The list of universal desires continues: “interpret the actions of people”, “add in what romance I can”, “play with what little I have learned for all that it is worth”. It would be too glib to say that speaks for her creator. But on finishing I Hear You’re Rich, which is by turns joyful and unnerving, you would be inclined to answer: yes.

Over the space of 110 pages, Williams unfolds 33 scenarios-in-snapshot, most of them domestic and familial, and dealing, as far as one can tell, with Americans in America.…