What is the author's tone in the short-story collection, The UnAmericans?

One common characteristic throughout the stories has to do with a certain quality of tonal coolness. In many cases, the feelings experienced by the characters run quite deep, but are described in a way that keeps the reader at a degree of distance. As noted in “Point of View” above, many of the stories are written in a first person point of view that pulls the reader into moment-by-moment development of the story, but the relative coolness of the narrative voice doesn’t quite draw the reader into its emotion-by-emotion development in the same way. There are glimpses of vivid emotional color: Asaaf’s violence in “Minor Heroics”; Raya’s bitterness and anger in “My Grandmother…”; Alexi’s shock at his son’s behavior in “The Unknown Soldier” (perhaps the most emotionally accessible of the stories”; and the deepening despair of Boaz in “Retrospective” are some examples of occasional interjections of deep feeling into narratives that, for the most part and in spite of efforts of present tense narration, tend to portray situations rather than fully engage the reader in them.