Stories, Like Lives, That Won’t Round Off : THE DEATH OF METHUSELAH and Other Stories<i> by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $17.95; 244 pp.) </i>

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories are not shapely, not “rounded-off.” A Singer story doesn’t culminate in a character’s “epiphany,” the mating of character and history that forces him to acknowledge an irrevocable entrapment, a fate. In fact, Singer’s stories rarely have culminating moments at all. A Singer character may wonder over his fate, but then he repeats his damnation, or struggles against it, or is cast by tumultuous history into another, distant locale. By most standards, his stories are badly formed. Yet to my surprise, I found them nourishing.

Singer, one might say, doesn’t precisely write short stories. Instead, he makes vivid narrative fragments. He knows pieces of a thousand good tales, like the one about how the Jews of Warsaw fled to Russia, only to watch the Stalinist Jews collaborate in betraying the Trotskyites; or about the young yeshiva student who abandons his wife, only to be discovered by her years later, living as a woman with another man; or the story of Methuselah’s last temptation and how the devils created in him a longing for death.

And Singer acquires more stories by the moment. “Please forgive me for taking up so much of your precious time,” a character will say. “To whom could I tell a story like this? There are philosophers, psychologists, and even those who consider themselves writers at the university, but to confide in them would be sheer suicide.” Singer can be trusted, for he won’t round off a story with a psychological “truth.” Such bagatelles are “just words, names. . . . What people really are they don’t know themselves. The fact is that we are all searching.” Singer narratives have lively, if quickly told, plots, a vivid sensual apprehension, and, most crucially, a sense of the world gone awry, of evil.

This disorder is too often, and too sourly, identified with the failings of his women characters, their real, or imagined lack of fidelity. Repeated in many of the stories, this obsession seems crabbed, unequal to the metaphysical weight that Singer wants to give it. In “The Recluse,” for example, the unfaithful husband can no longer trust himself, and so doubts his wife. He must wander the world alone. In “The Peephole at the Gate,” Singer meets a man who confesses that he had abandoned his first love when, spying through a gate, he saw her kissing a coachman. “To me a man betrayed was a man defiled--a leper.”

“Without religion,” Singer tells him, “there is no faithfulness.”

“So what shall I do? Pray to a God who let six million Jews be killed? I don’t believe in God.”

“If you don’t believe in God you have to live with whores.”

Fortunately in the story--in a scene whose innocent vanity outdoes even Norman Mailer’s--the very existence of Singer restores the man’s faith:

“ ‘Yes, it’s you. Now that you mention it, I recognize you from the pictures. I’ve read every word you’ve ever written. I always dreamed of meeting you.’

“For a moment neither of us spoke. Then Sam said, ‘If this could happen to me on this ship, then there is a God.’ ”

In Singer’s stories, God is at issue even if He is hated. This gives a deep background to the lives Singer tells and an importance to his characters’ actions. Society may either be hallowed or remain in exile. The soul will be atoned with God and the community or it will wander alone.

So one’s life could have an order, or a profound disorder. This makes for the startling direct address of Singer’s characters, as they recount a life that they urgently feel should have had a coherent shape. They know they failed to attain that shape, but they still believe, angrily, as they turn about, that it might have been. And the narrative they tell may be cut off, but they don’t end, for in the law, there is always some action one is called upon to perform. In the hell of Singer’s “Sabbath in Gehenna,” the unhappy spirits attempt to plan God’s overthrow, argue, and are returned to their week of torture. But their torture is purgatorial. Even in Gehenna, the dialogue between man and God continues; the story, so to speak, doesn’t round off.

Singer’s fragmentary quality comes, too, from darker sources than this open-ended sense of narrative. The world is awry because we are endlessly askew to our heart’s center. Singer is a divided, vain man, who presents himself fully in these narratives, with his yearning for wider experience, and his reverence for the hedge of the law. “Logarithms” tells of a brilliant Yeshiva student who is attracted to a Gentile woman for her intelligence and wider culture. And the young narrator, too, shares that attraction. “I could not understand why I felt a great compassion arise in me for Yossele and something like a desire to know Helena, play chess with her and learn logarithms. I remember my brother Joshua in a quarrel saying to my father, ‘The other nations studied and learned, made discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, but we Jews remained stuck on a little law of an egg which was laid on a holiday.’ I also remembered my father answering, ‘this little law contains more wisdom than all the discoveries the idolaters have made since the time of Abraham.’ ” Singer knows that without law, there is faithlessness. But he knows that our hearts are endlessly discontent; we also want logarithms. We can’t simply have one coherent saving story. So Singer only knows fragments of stories. But how many can give even that much?