Short-Story Canvas Small for a Large-Scale Brush : IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY <i> by T. Coraghessan Boyle (Viking: $17.95; 224 pp.) </i>

The stories in “If the River Was Whiskey” are for the most part short tales, many of them ironic or satiric, and with a touch of contemporary fable to them.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, who wrote “Budding Prospects,” a fresh and funny novel about a hippie turned cash-crop farmer, and “World’s End,” an ambitious entwining of historic legend and present-day lives, has prefaced his collection with an epigraph from the late Italo Calvino.

There is, in fact, an occasional suggestion of one of Calvino’s tiny myths going off suddenly in the pocket, like a defective exploding cigar. A banal detail is turned upside down so its false teeth pop out.

Boyle will take a contemporary fad or practice and inflate it to a parodic extreme. He will, upon occasion, try for a moment of charged sadness or radiance, of the kind that Calvino would introduce by surprise into his elegant allegories.

Unfortunately, Boyle’s sensibility is not really suited to such a thing. His odd plots and characters are oddities without connection; they suggest no strangeness outside of themselves. And even in the better tales, a good parodic contrivance will go wrong, as if it had lost its sense of direction.

“Sorry Fugu,” the first story of the collection, starts off with a promising spin. A much-feared restaurant critic is going to get her come-uppance, but before she does, Boyle skewers food-critic language as many of us, no doubt, have longed to see it skewered. Here is a specimen:

“Limp radicchio . . . Sorry Fugu . . . A blasphemy of baby lamb’s lettuce, frisee, endive . . . A coulibiac made in hell . . . For all its rather testy piquancy, the orange sauce might just as well have been citron preserved in pickling brine.”

As he recounts the efforts of Albert, a restaurateur, to tame the formidable Wilma Frank, who has never been known to praise a meal, Boyle comes up with a lovely notion or two. Albert discovers that Frank is scared of food, so she invariably brings along a friend to tell her what to think.

Since the friend’s taste runs to overdone steak and boiled peas, his verdicts are consistently negative; so, accordingly, are hers. And as she confesses to Albert, once he gets her in his power through a stratagem, it’s really safer for a critic to pan than to praise.

It is a nice thought. After all, a bad review, since it keeps people away, will have fewer detractors than a good one, which will bring the potential second-guessers flocking in.

The trouble is that Boyle has a frustratingly uncertain command of his plot. The stratagem by which Frank is unmasked is fuzzed up by a series of peculiar deflections.

The same is true for “Modern Love,” a satirical piece about the current fear of contamination.

“There was no exchange of body fluids on the first date, and that suited both of us just fine,” it begins. It goes on to tell of a woman so fastidious that when she finally agrees to have sex with her boyfriend, it is on condition that both encase themselves entirely in plastic. Before she will agree to marry, her fiance must undergo a thorough physical examination. The notion is amusing, if not brilliant, but here again, the author fogs up the ending.

A different contemporary worry--security--is parodied in “Peace of Mind,” which tells of a high-powered burglar-alarm saleswoman who sells $5,000 systems by telling householders of the terrible things that have happened just down the street. She manages to push one deranged potential client over the edge; he goes on a rampage that claims as victims two of the saleswoman’s own clients. She then uses their story, of course, to make still more sales.

Again, the concept is promising and Boyle gets in some funny lines. One client is obsessed with the notion that a burglar will tie her up and gag her with her underwear; “Can you imagine that, I mean, the taste of it--your own underwear?” But the story is told awkwardly and with uncertain effect.

Several of the pieces are little more than gimmicks. There is a routine about a Hollywood PR type trying to convince the Ayatollah Khomeini to brighten up his image; a story about a stunt man, obsessed with making it big, who rides from Maine to California suspended under the axle of a trailer truck; another about a child with criminal tendencies who terrorizes his adoptive parents up to a final grisly denouement.

There are a couple of strained literary parodies, one of Hemingway, the other of the film, “The Big Chill.” There is a different kind of strain in a story of a woman scientist who prefers apes to people, and who dies with her pet chimpanzee in a kind of airborne Liebestod. You feel the author is trying to suggest a wider mystery; he does not get beyond an individual peculiarity.

A more successful connection between the askew and the universally askew is made in the story of an old widow who declares her loneliness by opening every water outlet in her house and flooding the neighborhood. And there is a lighter but quite perfect bit of satire in “Zapatos,” the story of a Latin American shopkeeper who outwits his country’s corrupt authorities by an ingenious scheme that involves the separate importing of 30,000 left-foot and 30,000 right-foot shoes, each lot through a different customs zone.

For the most part, though, Boyle’s talents do not seem to fit the form he uses in this collection. His brush is large; it does not work with miniatures.