The Sorrow and the Pity Balanced by Power and Beauty : ABSENT FRIENDS <i> by Frederick Busch (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 278 pp.) </i>

If Frederick Busch wrote about grapes, the birds would eat them off the pages. He writes about people, and we rock slightly in their wind as they go by.

Like other prominent American short story writers, his subject is distances of all kinds; between mates, lovers, friends, generations, bosses and employees, and most of all, between the individual and his or her life.

Busch is not content with revealing the distances. He dramatizes them. His characters rail at them, fight them, treat them with passion. They speak vividly, bitingly; they are often defeated but rarely resigned.

Almost all the stories in “Absent Friends” are downbeat, but they display a living, not a dying fall. Busch surrounds his people with ice, raises their temperatures a degree or two above normal and heightens their colors. Some of the stories are sardonic; the best are extremely sad. It is the deeper sadness that comes out of the plight of people with a talent for happiness.

“Name the Name,” perhaps the loveliest, angriest and saddest of the stories, lays out a scene of social wreckage: the devastation of a younger generation. The narrator is a teacher in a rural district whose job is to give lessons to children unable to attend school.

His first visit is to Myrna, a 12-year-old in an advanced state of pregnancy. He talks briefly with her mother, worried but unquestioningly loyal. She’d been pregnant at about the same age, she recalls; she and her husband will take care of the baby so Myrna can go back to being a little girl. And the baby’s father?

“No, they’re too young. He’ll have to live with his own mommy and daddy.” It is the kind of quiet phrase that Busch is master of; one with a scream hidden in it, a scream for a world of lost children. Myrna waves politely as the teacher leaves.

The visit to Leslie is even more rending. A fearful overdose of pills has put her permanently in an intensive care unit, unable to speak and barely to move. She communicates by scrawling on an “Invisible Pad.”

“How’s the spider?” he asks, his customary joking reference to the web of tubes that keeps her alive. “Not spider fly,” she writes. “Love U.” When he tells her she must keep up her work, she scrawls “Why?” So, she can go to college, he says. “Bologna,” she writes. Minutes later, though, she ads, “What college?” And, just before he leaves, “Kiss.”

The narrator’s tone, level and angry, keeps the sorrow of such a story in unmoving focus. Leslie is the all-but-unbearable climax; the third visit is a mournful passage down from it. It is to the narrator’s son, arrested for vandalism and facing the prospect of a work camp.

At the end, we hear the question: What have we come to?--but it is framed in the children’s gestures: Myrna’s wave, Leslie’s “Love U” and the son’s frightened “Dad?”

Not all the stories are as good as “Name the Name,” which I think will become a classic. Several are wispy vignettes of disappointment and frustration. But the tone is rarely less than authentic, and Busch’s individual sensibilities are almost always linked to some larger social theme.

In “Orbits,” the isolation between the generations is strikingly told with a visit by a middle-aged couple to the wife’s aged parents. They are well off and in reasonable health, but they have shrunk inside their pleasant house. Death is not far away; the old man, once a charming and successful businessman, has put his most amusing recollections on tapes. The four sit on the porch at night, listening to this taped immortality.

Busch’s dramatizing gives his distances life and power. Sometimes he takes dramatic shortcuts, piling on the hypocrisy or clownishness of his hypocrites and clowns. In “Ralph the Duck,” the satisfying come-uppance of a college security guard against a snobbish and lecherous professor becomes a little thinner because of the shortcuts.

It is a wry and wiry story, nonetheless, and it begins with one of the splendid bits of scene-setting that Busch is so good at. The guard is beginning his day, badly:

“I woke up at 5:25 because the dog was vomiting. I carried 75 pounds of heaving golden retriever to the door and poured him onto the silver, moonlit snow. ‘Good boy,’ I said because he’d done his only trick.”

There is another hint of caricature in “From the new World,” but it is no more than a quirk in an otherwise magisterial and richly textured story. (“Rich” is a word that invariably comes up in connection with Busch’s writing, but it is a tense and disciplined richness.)

The daughter and the estranged son of a wealthy, domineering lawyer come home after his death to settle his and their affairs. The son, a film maker, brings with him the wife who was the subject of the estrangement. She is black, strong and splendid. Her splendor--a mix of wit, warmth and steel--contrasts with the pinched snobbery of the sister. (Here, perhaps, is the touch of caricature.)

Over a long night, all the angers and buried pain of a cold family are made to come out. At the end, the son overcomes sorrow and compunction with the help of his wife; they sneak away before daybreak. The sister, her knots barely loosened, watches from the window, a prisoner still.

There are other memorable stories in the collection; in particular, “North,” which tells gracefully of the efforts of a shop attendant in a small town to escape a meaningless marriage and the male tyranny of her boss.

Busch writes of a general decay of custom and humanity with a fierce particularity. His characters are actors in the best sense of the word. The lift of a shoulder, the lilt or fury of a voice, chain us to his melancholy themes and release us from them at the same time.