CONFESSIONS OF A BAD GIRL <i> by Bette Pesetsky (Atheneum: $17.95; 211 pp.)</i>

Humor is a rare commodity in contemporary American fiction, but the author’s type of humor is rarer still, lacking the nervous edge so common in the genre, from Don DeLillo’s end-is-near antics to Jay McInerney’s black comedy. Bette Pesetsky’s colorful characters generally accept their world, content to find happiness within its social conventions. Through allegiance to the suburban routine and efforts to avoid saying the provocative thing, they skirt around the kind of dramatic conflict that might highlight a DeLillo or McInerney novel.

This is not to say that Pesetsky’s characters don’t occasionally feel constrained by social convention. Cissie, for example, a character who appears in most of these stories, is estranged from her family, for their obsession with appearing “normal” keeps them from communicating, lest that reveal some dreaded uniqueness. More often, however, social convention seems a necessity in these pages, for it keeps these fragile characters from inflicting too much damage on each other. Cissie, for instance, doesn’t question her roommate Roberta about her increasingly eccentric behavior (she becomes particularly fond of exuberantly dancing naked around the dorm shouting, “Skin, skin, my dears, is this year’s look!”), or her other roommate about “the man” in her life (“the one with the wife and children”). Likewise, her roommates don’t ask questions when Cissie shows up unannounced at their friends’ parties, holding a cake or container of soup. “ ‘Specialty of the Day,’ I would announce, presenting the unwanted.”