Young and in love

Anyone who’s lived beyond puberty knows that romantic love covers a spectrum of emotions, not all of them good.

It’s this spectrum that author David Levithan demonstrates so well in “How They Met,” a collection of short stories for young adults that offer varying angles on the heart’s entanglements -- most from a gay or lesbian perspective, and many with less than ideal outcomes. That’s why the 18 pieces that make up the collection aren’t called love stories but stories about love, which allows the author to show the emotion’s multitudinous and messy permutations.

The book doesn’t immediately clobber readers over the head with the negative. It begins with a lighthearted boy-on-boy crush story that has a happy ending. It’s only in the second piece -- “Miss Lucy Had a Steamboat” -- that Levithan begins to go deeper, chronicling the painful if exhilarating trajectory of falling for someone who doesn’t love you back, and doing it with dark humor.

Like many of the stories in “How They Met,” “Miss Lucy” is written in the first person and the action takes place in high school, where emotions are already at a fever pitch. Add a mom who refuses to acknowledge your sexual orientation, a girlfriend who won’t be seen with you in public and a caustic, honest-to-the-bone wit, and you’ve got all the elements of a teen tragicomedy.

Although Levithan’s stories are a mix of gay and straight, he’s at his best when writing about same-sex couples. They may be fictional, but they evoke very plausible scenarios. In “The Alumni Interview,” for example, a gay teen forces his closeted boyfriend to come out in front of his father. In “The Good Witch,” a boy realizes he’s gay only when his pretty-in-pink prom date forces it out of him.

Levithan is a fine writer across the board, but he’s less emotionally resonant and more contrived when writing about straight relationships. “The Number of People Who Meet on Airplanes,” for example, is a little too meet-cute: A pair of college students are seated next to each other on an airplane, thanks to a matchmaking flight attendant. “A Romantic Inclination,” about two high school friends who spend their physics class theorizing about what would happen if their relationship turned romantic, also is overly clever and would be easy to dismiss were it not for the fact that Levithan actually wrote the story when he was in high school.

It was “A Romantic Inclination” -- conceived for friends and given as a Valentine’s Day gift -- that prompted Levithan to begin writing seriously. In fact, many of these stories began as Valentine’s gifts. Together, they have the feel of a bittersweet reality check -- a very nice counterbalance to the usual candy hearts and chocolates.

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susan.carpenter@latimes.com