Stories From the Tube

It’s a clever premise: a book of short stories that pick up where television commercials leave off. In other words, you can find out what happens after the couplein the deodorant ad head off to their fancy-schmancy fund-raiser. But do you really want to know? A jumbled, occasionally hilarious, and downright surreal collection of yarns awaits you in Matthew Sharpe’s Stories From the Tube, though many end up reading more like freaky Red Shoe Diaries excerpts than social commentary. The best ones — like ”Rose in the House,” in which an insurance-commercial grandma and her charge end up sharing weed in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park — get lost in a series of forgettable vignettes that are much cuter in conception than in execution. C+