Fending Off Love : SAILING TO CORINTH Stories <i> by Irene Wanner (Owl Creek Press, distributed by Kampman & Co.: $15.95; 235 pp.) </i>

A fat girl in a blue jogging suit; an ex-football star in a Ferrari; husbands, wives, students, waitresses, professors--everyone in Irene Wanner’s world is on the run. Consumed by want, fearing commitment, expecting disappointment, they hit the road, or the bottle or the sheets, with whoever turns up for the ride.

If they don’t bolt, they dream about it constantly. In “Ozzie and Harriet,” a woman caught up in home-buying with a lover finds relief remembering herself younger, unencumbered. The narrator of “The Blue Bear,” trapped in a hated job, doodles letters of resignation while swapping phone chat with her parents.

A crisp, no-frills writer with an ear for everyday speech, Wanner, recipient of a 1988 Western States Book Award, understands how even lonely hearts fend off love. She knows how parents and children miscommunicate, how married life, breaking down, can seesaw between guilt and retribution.

What she isn’t as clear on, along with many of her characters, is what to do about these things. Given to neat, TV-style resolutions, she bypasses the quieter illuminations that are often the payoffs of great stories.

In “Red Light Returning,” one of Wanner’s best, a complex look at a fraying marriage is marred by an end that solves everything with one kiss-and-make-up conversation. Elsewhere, closing statements stand in for missing drama.

“I have learned that a man can leave his home and manage to keep things that matter,” says a runaway husband unconvincingly, after a non-encounter with a pretty hitchhiker. And, “I understand much more. I see . . . you so clearly,” a traveling wife writes just as cryptically to the husband she has regaled for weeks with impersonal food, weather and tour-group details.

Part of the trouble lies with the characters themselves. With a few exceptions, they are concepts more than fleshed-out human beings--a coarse but good-hearted waitress, a wife in search of independence, a husband tired of being nagged. Since they lack nuance and depth, it’s hard to predict what they will do next, much less expect from them the kind of subtle shifts in perception that a short story depends on.

Where they come alive, if they do, is in their speech. Here, under the guise of idle talk, the narrator of “The Blue Bear” takes a swipe at her dieting mother:

“ ‘What are you planning to do today?’ mother asks.

“ ‘Oh, I don’t know. You?’

“ ‘Our walk,’ my father says. ‘We’ll probably go to the Williamsburg library and up to the cafeteria for coffee.’

“ ‘You mean pie,’ I say.”

More problematic for Wanner is maintaining dramatic focus. Once she sets an action up, she often falters on the follow-through. In “The Dancing Dinosaur Diner,” a story reminiscent of country music, she lets a beat-up ex-cowboy who wears Lone Ranger garb for a car sales job foil a robbery at his lover’s diner. Though he triumphs with his toy Colts, the moment dissipates as he, his lover and her husband sit down to breakfast and platitudes--”It’s time to move on. . . . A man can fool himself just so long.”

In her finest story, Wanner displays a subtler hand and a patience for unfolding time that promises more than her first book delivers. “You Are Here”--in which a car accident illuminates the private lives of neighbors--is a meditation on adult confusion between longing and reality. The richness of the story indicates what’s to come once Wanner’s style, themes and the right subject matter come together--writing with much to say on the mixed grace of being human.