All Broken Families Are Alike : WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST AND OTHER STORIES <i> by Francine Prose (Pantheon Books: $16.95; 196 pp.) </i>

The stories of Francine Prose are for those with an appetite for the domestic disturbances of modern society and the frailness of human relationships. That is not to say that we have had enough of everyday life--and certainly in Prose’s hands, such familiar material is shaped by intellect, a compassionate eye and acerbic invention. Nevertheless, the weakness of any collection is that similarities of theme serve to dilute and weaken. Thus, I fear, too many marriages are dissolving in these pages.

Yet one of the better stories deals exactly with this loss--but does so with a poignant sensibility and a lucid voice. In “Electricity,” Anita, clutching baby Bertie in her arms, has left her unfaithful husband and returned to her childhood home. The television set--that barometer of tranquillity--is silent. Home has changed. Father, you see, became a born-again Hasid. No, we are not to be rewarded by Cynthia Ozick exuberance. We have instead an account of the multiplying household disruptions, from a need for two sets of dishes to lovemaking through a hole in a sheet. But the parents will not separate. “Who would it help?” their mother asks. “Would it make me happier? Would it make Daddy happier?” What is wanted is a return to what was. This is possible for neither mother nor daughter. Anita anticipates years with a weekend father for Bertie. “She imagines men and children lolling in a steamy pool, pumping Exercycles, straining on Nautilus machines. There are no women in her vision, it’s as if all the mothers have died of some plague.”

In “Useful Ceremonies,” we have another refugee from marriage in Becky who journeys to her sister’s house and while collecting books for a charity meets the older Flexners who have their own floundering marriage. “Flexner is killing me. My husband, Lou Flexner, is crazy and trying to kill me. Please help.” This is the message Mrs. Flexner leaves in a book for Becky to find. Why are we not challenged? Is it that accounts of everyday life have begun to acquire a repertoire of predictable situations? Parallels abound between abandoned women in these tales--but in these vintage years for the short story, the reader wants the inescapable irony--not the formulated one.

Prose’s heroines are mostly lonely city women. What do lonely city women do on weekends? In “Tibetan Time,” Ceci expresses her need for human contact by going to a retreat at a Dharma Center where her isolation is deftly explored by the author. We see the nursery school teacher surrounded by weekend Buddhists, west side analysts searching for a therapeutically sound philosophy, people on the trail of spiritual progress. Ceci, out of synchronism everywhere, eats too fast, moves too slowly and finds herself the only one wearing shoes during meditation.

Ceci, who paid extra for a private audience with the visiting lama, confesses her problem: “My husband broke up with me at a sushi bar. We were sitting side by side. The sushi chef wasn’t watching exactly, but he was there. My husband told me that he was moving to Arizona; then he ordered another cucumber salmon-skin roll.”

The most lasting attachments in Prose’s stories are those between parent and child. Neither husbands nor friends are forever. In the title piece, “Women and Children First,” mother and son are bound by extrasensory perception. Thus, in a world where testing creates reality, Janet takes her son Kevin to a laboratory to have the extent of their ESP measured. “Dr. Wilmot tells them that the final results aren’t in yet but right now the quick matchups indicate an unusually high score at least in one direction--Janet sending, Kevin receiving.”

Some stories are too facile, risking nothing. In “Everyday Disorders,” the visiting famous photographer turns out to be a liar and borrower of other people’s lives. “Everyone had a Lobster” gets down to the mores of shared summer houses--where pornography is just around the corner.

As a novelist, Prose is a fabulist--a teller of elegant tales within tales. Here, she is too controlled, too careful. All these vulnerable women are vulnerable in uniform ways. The men--mostly departing husbands and lovers--have made similar adjustments to life.

A notable exception is Ray in “Creature Comforts,” who is seeking salvation through mystical starvation on a diet of egg rolls and perfectly willing to take his cat along with him. “The cat and I take our little meals at the same time. I read aloud to it. I want the cat to be prepared.” This quirky, semi-itinerant carpenter, a burden to his family as he prepares himself for a better proteinless life--is splendid. When Prose abandons the banalities of the everyday world for touches of a different reality, she captures this reader.