BOOK REVIEW : Tasty Tales That Grow Dizzying After a While

Escapes by Joy Williams (Atlantic Monthly Press: $18.95; 180 pages).

By the luck of the draw for this critic, short-story collections have been pouring in, so that in the space of a week, like a drunk on a binge, I’ve gone through six of them: stories about the homeless, stories “from the rest of the world,” stories by Carol Emshwiller, Susan Dodd and perhaps the current reigning queen of this form, Joy Williams.

At some level, it’s a little like drinking 27 whiskey sours, or eating 18 bags of chocolate bit cookies. The short stories are the refuge of heightened sensitivities, the apercu in spades; the tragic random incidents, the gratuitous fortune. The short story also searches for, and sometimes finds, the quick-fix shortcut to enlightenment.

But there are only so many misfortunes in this world, only so many apercus , unfortunately, and our metaphors for magic moments are cruelly limited. Thus, when you read the title story here, “Escapes,” in which a girl on the edge of adulthood ponders the performance of a provincial magician and understands there are some things magic can’t fix, it’s not Joy Williams’ fault that right next door to her on the short-story shelf, Mary Bush has written a vignette in which a girl on the edge of adulthood ponders the performance of a provincial magician--and so on.

When Williams writes a story about “The Blue Men,” in which the controlling metaphor is the Taureg, that splendid set of nomadic North Africans where the men go veiled and the women reveal their forearms when they want to insult someone--those gaudy, unregenerate Taureg who live by their wits in the impenetrable desert!--it isn’t Williams’ fault that, in this same month, Ibrahim Al-Kouni has used the Taureg for that same purpose in one of his stories.

And when Joy Williams uses crib death or the death of a child to cut to the tragedy in a page or two, it’s not her fault if the death of a child in the short story world this season is as prevalent as the common cold in the real world.

Williams’ strength is in her purity of writing, her elegant melancholia. There’s a lot of elegant agony, Joan Didion agony, in these stories: “At the bottom of the bank, a flat stream moved laboriously around fine covered trees. The mud glistened in the sun. Blackberries grew in the brush. This place had a lot of candor, Gloria thought.” Gloria is picnicking with a woman she doesn’t like, but that isn’t the half of it. She also has an inoperable brain tumor, and she’s only in her 30s.

Later, in another story, another woman rests in “a simple and pleasant” room. “It seemed to Joan the kind of room in which someone was supposed to be getting better.” Joan’s problem? Two children lost to crib death, but who’s counting?

Every once in a while, Williams gets funny. Parts of “Gurdjieff in the Sunshine State” are funny. Not witty, but funny, as if a movie queen were to break unexpectedly through her icy beauty and tell a bawdy joke. “Lu-lu,” the story of an elderly couple, a lonely woman and a snake with a bad personality, is very funny. But when you look to see if Williams will let herself be funny again, she’s already back to elegant melancholia.

These stories seem retro, as if the author is saying that the human condition is hopeless and our only weapons with which to address this condition are insight, intelligence, misery and style.

The short-story form is not a place where characters have room to act , to move, to fight. They can only register what happens, take it on the chin.

Williams is a gorgeous writer and a master of the short story. And reading these short stories is wonderful, just like drinking whiskey sours at sunset, except that after the sixth one, you begin to feel dizzy and ill. You long for some fresh air. Or a heroic act. Some Alka Seltzer, or a helicopter rescue.