A Holiday at the Inn, and Other Sorrows : LINE OF FALL <i> by Miles Wilson (University of Iowa Press: $17.95; 180 pp.) </i>

Conflicts of territory figure strongly in most of the stories in Miles Wilson’s collection, “Line of Fall”: His characters stake out territory, defend it, abandon it, die for it. They’re often at a point where an act of recklessness or irresponsibility will alter their lives and affect those close to them.

In one of the strongest stories, “Wyoming,” a disillusioned academic, who has lost his wife to another man, drives in a blizzard from Indiana to San Francisco for a job interview when a mute woman--he thinks of her as a girl--chooses him to transport her West. In a surreal encounter, she becomes his catalyst for divesting himself of everything that binds him to his present reality--his manuscript, his clothing, his sense of self. As he becomes vulnerable and exposes himself to a different freedom, she disappears with a “gesture of, what--permission, benediction, regret?”

“Everything” is a funny and sad story about the nature of obsession, explored through Roger, a compulsive garage-sale shopper: “What could be more wholesome than rising at dawn on the weekend to save money by spending it?” After he loses his wife due to his compulsion, he is pursued by a woman who is drawn to his single-minded purpose and moves into his house that is filled with bargains. When she urges him to increase his collection, he loses his lust for acquisition, just as his wife’s disapproval had pushed him into the opposite direction of her wishes.

As in “Wyoming,” the marriage dissolves without emotional impact--she gets this, he gets that, and they part. This lack of emotional impact weakens several of Wilson’s stories. Although he establishes his characters and plots with apparent skill, he doesn’t always follow through when it comes to the impact of the experiences he has developed. Without that impact, the experience by itself ceases to be significant.

But in “Christmas at the Dixie Motel,” the emotional impact is fully realized. A divorced father tries to celebrate Christmas with his two young daughters at a tacky motel. He remembers how he used to imagine his family’s return after his wife left him. “For the first year or so, I’d make up ways they’d come back. They’d show up out of nowhere on Thanksgiving. Or Carla would be crippled in a wreck or get breast cancer and I’d take her back.”

His connection to his children feels flimsy, and he is afraid of losing them, afraid they’ll forget him. As in several other stories, Wilson explores a situation where communication is hampered by lack of connection or language; yet, the links that his characters develop for brief intervals reverberate beyond those time spans.

Wilson tells his stories in a straightforward and factual voice that does not carry the power of language that he proves himself capable of in his endings, where his prose takes on a wonderful intensity and richness. His endings move into a different level of awareness--almost dreamlike--taking the characters into an altered state that frees them from the concrete and allows them to achieve a sense of closure that transcends their state of being.

A number of Wilson’s characters work for the U.S. Forest Service, a position Wilson has held in Oregon and California. His knowledge of the work and the territory lends authenticity to his fiction. In “Fire Season,” a ranger defends “the land from its people, and sometimes, arrogant, defend(s) the land even from itself.” But the fire claims thousands of acres, making him and the other rangers aware that they’re only “flickers of flesh: negligible, there, remarkable beyond all accounting.” The ending, again, is excellent; it opens up a vision beyond the landscape of the story without tearing the link to its origin.

A few of the stories, among them “Going Away” and “Waterworks, Rim, and Angel,” don’t work because the narrator and voice get in the way of the story’s potential. Others, like “Gospel Hump,” are rather episodic, recounting a sequence of events without coming to any sense of genuine closure.

Wilson is not afraid of exploring unsympathetic characters in “Baja” and “Long Green.” An American, visiting Mexico with his wife, pays an enormous price for his sexism and racism. A pool player, who is a sexist, is afraid of having lost the magic. “It used to be all one thing, all together--the smoke, the game, the music, everything. Now there’s me, the stick, the pocket, and two balls. And it doesn’t fit together anymore.”

Wilson, who won the 1989 John Simmons Short Fiction Award for this collection, joins an impressive line of writers whose books have been recognized by the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series, among them Cyrus Colter, Dianne Benedict, C. E. Poverman and Barry Targan.