She’s kind of a nut job, the narrator of Julie Hecht’s collection of short stories, “Happy Trails to You” (Simon & Schuster, 209 pages, $24), but she definitely has a point about Paul McCartney’s hair. Even those of us who haven’t set up a Paul McCartney Google Alert, as she has, noticed, if we were paying any attention at all, when he abandoned aging gracefully in favor of coloring his salt-and-pepper hair.

“Paul McCartney has problems with dark brown,” she opines in “Thank You for the Mittens,” when the subject wends its way to the inadvisability of black hair dye in later years. This is the point at which the reader, if she has been unable to find anyone in her real life to share her dismay at Sir Paul’s unfortunate grooming decision, will — figuratively, at any rate — stand and cheer.

Sir Paul’s allure, to the nameless narrator, has much to do with his vegetarianism but even more with his being part of her baby boomer pop-culture past. A longing for that past suffuses this collection, whose seven stories find her either at home somewhere in the country or, in summer and fall, at a plush rental on Nantucket.

The quiet rhythms of island and rural life give the stories their shape, but the source of their beauty is the magnetic oddness of Ms. Hecht’s anxious, rule-bound, crunchy narrator, a technophobic landscape photographer perplexed and disheartened by contemporary life, plagued by the news, disgusted by “the lack of education in the new, decadent, lazy generation.”

“I was thinking about the world,” she reports in “A Little Present on This Dark November Day,” easing into her customary deadpan alarm. “This is a mistake and can lead to insanity.”

She makes this mistake far too often throughout these linked stories, and though one gets the impression that she has always been rather fraught, paying attention to the world and the other people in it does not help matters.

In “Being and Nothingness,” for example, a routine trip to the organic-produce store becomes a reminder to her of the deterioration of grammar.

When I arrived, the fruit manager was juicing some dented fruit and talking about her failed romance. “How will I get along without him?” she asked, as if I might know.

“Maybe you can patch things up,” I said.

“No, too much has gone on between Jim and I,” she said with sadness.

“‘Jim and me,'” I said. “Object of a preposition.”

“Really? It sounds wrong. ‘Jim and me.'”

“‘Between Jim and me.’ ‘Between us,'” I said. “‘Between them.'”

This is the sort of order to which our heroine clings amid the peril and decline that she sees everywhere, and through which she finds her way alone, for the most part. She seeks wisdom and comfort more from books than from other people; old movies are her touchstones.

She has a husband, but he is an entirely amorphous figure, barely even a presence in these stories. Her parents are dead, her siblings either estranged or far away. At home, an elderly neighbor affords some companionship, as well as a reminder of how she might have treated her father better toward the end of his life. On Nantucket, the staff of a casual-chic restaurant where she’s a regular (despite the fact that she’s a vegan, and the chefs seem to have only a tenuous grasp of what that means) provides most of her social interactions. Her loneliness and disconnection are palpable, matter-of-fact. “Paul McCartney was not in my social circle,” she says, aware that she’s absurd. “I had no circle.”

Ms. Hecht’s photographer is too peculiar and rife with contradictions to be a type, and yet she fits perfectly into a certain white, liberal, upper-middle-class, Northeast milieu, in which insistence on organically grown everything somehow doesn’t preclude regular use of the most cutting-edge pharmaceuticals.

Well-meaning and self-satisfied, the narrator is politically fierce in a way that may be off-putting to some readers no matter where they are on the ideological spectrum. She is also astoundingly contortionistic on matters of race, as when, fearing that it has some sort of offensive connotation, she can’t bring herself to use the word “straighten” in a conversation about hair with her Jamaican cleaning woman in “Get Money.”

The other word, “relaxed,” was in the same category as the new usage of the word invented for phonying-up fabric or paint finishes on furniture to be fake antique — “distressed.” I’d never use it with that meaning, and if anyone said it to me I had to quickly turn away from the person.

Ms. Hecht never mocks her photographer, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t ridiculous. Willfully alone though she is, she’s like an eccentric friend who is entertaining company in small doses, which each of these stories in turn provides.