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.

All right, Bush is the Alfred E. Neuman president and the 21st century so far seems pretty horrible and so on, but the narrator’s wrath allows her to fall into lazy, repetitive utterance that is shocking coming from such a (former) craftsman of tensile nuance as Julie Hecht. The constant iteration of these themes — America’s decadence, the ignorance of the young — sounds strident and obsessive, and the motifs quickly become petty and uninteresting. It’s difficult to build a work of fiction on a foundation of annoyance and reproach.

Worse, though, is the narrator’s attitude toward foreigners. Though she is a raging liberal and doesn’t even want to have Republican friends, the narrator’s comments about immigrants who work in Nantucket, where all the stories are set, are disturbingly conservative. The “polite Irish workers” have been replaced by “angry Jamaicans” who speak “a language Americans couldn’t understand” in “a loud, urgent tone.” She says: “Ukrainians can be so scary that meeting just one or two of them enables a complete understanding of the Cold War.” Her Jamaican maid “(cannot) understand simple directions.” Nor is she less condescending about non-foreigners. Her clerical assistant is “an all-American nitwit. Even ordinary words were new to her.” She doesn’t mind asking a wealthy neighbor about her domestic help because “she was a nouveau.”

This is all disturbing and unpleasant and seems not to flow from the crystalline and ironic imagination of the Julie Hecht we know and adore(d). There are, it’s true, great passages in “Happy Trails to You” that will remind Hecht’s fans of the beguiling stories in “Do the Windows Open?” I love this, for example, from “Get Money:”

In childhood, the “Encyclopedia Britannica Junior” — many volumes in a set of blue books — was in my older sister’s room, and she kept me out of there. In this way, there were many things I never learned. Once, she threw a Kleenex box at me when I tried to enter her room. Because the globe was in there too, I never learned geography of the world.

Unfortunately, such airy, deadpan slyness is absent from too much of “Happy Trails to You.” What remains left a bad taste, like burned tofu, in my mouth.