One Way or Another Stories by Peter Cameron (Harper & Row: $15.95; 192 pp.)

Peter Cameron was 23 years old when he sold his first story to the New Yorker. Three years later, having placed seven more stories there, Cameron was one of five young writers whose work David Leavitt examined in the New York Times Book Review in a piece titled “New Voices and Old Values.”

Leavitt described “an attitude of angry betrayal” that fueled Cameron’s work, in a world where “marriages and families, rather than providing havens, are themselves the fulcrums of the most sweeping upheavals.” It is the children , wrote Leavitt, who “uphold the idea of family with a vengeance and upbraid their parents for giving up on it.”

In the 14 stories in Cameron’s first collection, there is a reversed sense of propriety. A young woman announces, “I want more rituals in my life.” Another young woman tells her boyfriend that his dream for the future is “retrograde.” What is this “Fifties” dream she makes fun of? “Being married. Owning a house. Having children. Coming home from work and watering the lawn.”

On closer look, the boyfriend reconsiders the plausibility of his dream: “Everything I want is obsolete,” he says. “I mean, who comes home and waters their lawn anymore? Who has a lawn? Who comes home?”

This longing, mixed with self-reflexive irony, is Cameron’s trademark. Occasionally, it is also tempered with a wistful optimism, as when a woman about to separate from her husband tries to explain her departure to their daughter: “I like to think things have changed more than failed,” she tells her.

Cameron’s young characters could grow up to inhabit an Ann Beattie story. That is, they are enveloped in sadness and peripherally out of step, but armed with a kind of self-conscious hope and dry, dry humor in the service of their judgmental natures.

Read “Memorial Day” to see just how judgmental youth can be. The divorced mother of a teen-age boy has had the appalling taste to remarry a man only 13 years the boy’s senior, a man she met at a Seth Speaks seminar. “He wasn’t here last year,” the boy says about his new stepfather, Lonnie. “I don’t think he was anywhere last year.”

What can a kid do? He can stop talking at home, for one thing, and he can write letters to people he has never met, people in prison, for another. But he can’t get over his mother’s lack of a “sense of sanctity,” and believes that “she would give Lonnie my father’s clothes if my father had left any behind to give.”

“Homework” is one of two stories here to be included in “Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards,” and it’s a heartbreaker. A boy who was unhappy even before his dog Keds was accidentally killed puts his mind to complicated algebra problems--his homework--in the aftermath of the dog’s death. It is a situation no less painful for its familiarity, and it works here exactly because there is no tearing of hair with the loss, nor with the other losses in these stories. A kind of skewed decorum is always preserved. It is Emily Dickinson’s “formal feeling,” after great pain.

Merciful decorum in the face of impending death is at issue in “Fast Forward.” Alison’s mother is dying at home in Maine. Alison runs a projector in a Cambridge movie house; after the midnight showing of “My Fair Lady,” she invites a friend from college to her mother’s home for the weekend. The friend doesn’t learn until they are on their way that Alison has told her mother they’re getting married.

Her “fiance” sees the deception through, of course, but after the gothic weekend, it is two months before he sees Alison again--at a New Year’s Eve party where she tells him that her mother died before Christmas.

With one exception, all of these stories are written in first person and/or present tense; they are uncluttered, yet filled-out enough to escape the current backlash against “minimalist” fiction. Only small things irritate: One winces at a grown man named “Timmy,” ditto the jarring use of the word lover when a story begins, “My lover, Keither, and his daughter, Violet . . . “ or “Jason, my uncle’s lover. . . .”

And the enveloping sadness tends to come off as weakness --there is a curious passivity to many of Cameron’s characters, though this is less a criticism than an observation, especially as it pertains to “Jump or Dive,” the riskiest, most disturbing story in the collection.

In the game of Jump or Dive, the command is given after the player has left the diving board: He must heed the caller’s choice in mid-air. The game parallels the decision facing a teen-age boy--whether to spend two vacation days with his parents or with his uncle and uncle’s homosexual lover.

Go or stay, jump or dive--Jason, the uncle’s lover, is playing another game with the boy, one of sexual provocation. At night, when the two of them are in the swimming pool, the boy hears something land “with a splat on the concrete” behind him; he realizes that “it was Jason’s bathing suit.”

“Home may be the most dangerous place of all,” David Leavitt wrote at the end of his Times article, “ . . . but it is also the only hope we have.”

Now we have Peter Cameron.