BOOK REVIEW : High-Risk Stories of Modern Life

Comedians by John L’Heureux (Viking: $17.95; 186 pp.).

John L’Heureux tries for a great deal in these stories. Their transactions, in which Gothic grimness, an antic fancy, and a touch of myth all play a part, are extreme ones. They end with no fashionable whimper but with an old-fashioned bang.

Too often, the bang is a misfire. Too often, the shapeliness he tries for is overworked and overdone. In his novel, “A Woman Run Mad,” L’Heureux quite successfully undermined the glib sophistications of modern life with elements of blood and madness, and a kind of primal exaltation.

In most of the stories in this collection, the effort collapses. Two of them, on the other hand, not only succeed but do so quite magnificently.

The title piece is a lovely, shrewd and unexpected modern fable. Corinne, a professional stand-up comic, discovers she’s pregnant at 38. She will, of course, have an abortion, her doctor implies; but she’s reluctant. So she consults Russ, her husband, who answers in thoroughly modern fashion:

“That’s great. If you want it, I mean. I want it. I mean, I want it if you do. It’s up to you, though. You know what I mean?” Later that night, he will stand before his mirror and look through his eyes until he can see his mind. “As he watches, it knots like a fist. And he continues to watch, glad, as that fist beats the new baby flat and thin, a dead slick silverfish.”

Thoroughly modern ambiguity, in other words. But fetuses are too young to be modern. And this one clearly wants to be born; and it starts to sing: “Some of These Days You’ll Miss Me, Honey.” “California, Here I Come” (they are a West Coast couple). Brahms. Telemann.

Naturally, the singing is a plus. On the other hand, Corinne wants to please the ambiguous Russ and put him under no strain. And the tests show the baby may be abnormal. Corinne pretends the singing is simply body noises, and it stops. But in the abortion clinic, it starts up again, and it continues right along through the ninth month and into the delivery room, where it switches triumphantly into Palestrina.

L’Heureux grows a bit over-lyrical at the end, but this is a small defect. And his lyricism works astonishingly well in the collection’s finest story, “Father.” An old man, stricken with Parkinson’s disease, begins to paint pictures; his son notices that each has a hairline crack.

As the father grows sicker, the cracks grow wider. And his wife, overwhelmed with the difficulty of caring for him, goes into near-breakdown. In the middle of the pictures, a cave-like empty space appears. “Our father,” the narrator says, “had left an absence in the center of things, for later.”

Finally, aware of the rational barbarity of the decision, the old man’s family finds a nursing home for him. When they go to break the news, he has disappeared, leaving one last painting of an open door.

“In the end,” this lovely and unsettling story tells us, “our father painted clear untroubled air and, quicker than our love, he entered it.”

If these two stories keep a difficult balance among fey, poignant and magical, none of the others manage to. One tells of an old choreographer who, seeing an unbearable mother and her son, designs a ballet about Lizzie Borden, the reputed mother-killer. Another tells of a music professor, a frustrated singer, who, after a ghastly scene with a woman who parks in his parking space, has his day finally ruined by hearing a lazy but talented student sing.

In “Nightfall,” a prim suburban matron, jealous of her daughter’s affair with a motorcyclist, manages to get rid of the girl and take her place. In “The Poison Girls,” a professor of creative writing is undone by the malevolent hatred of three students who refuse to accept any suggestions about their work, and resent him for making them.

There is a note of sardonic humor in this one--L’Heureux is a former creative writing professor. But like most of the others, it depends too heavily on a snap, melodramatic ending. They are maneuvered contrivances.

The longest piece, a novella about a master sculptor and a subservient wife who finally ends her subservience, is immensely murky and involved and ends bloodily. There is a suggestion of mystical martyrdom and redemption here, as well as in one or two of the others, but it is forced and unconvincing.

Clearly, L’Heureux’s efforts to weave myth, extremity and a religious note into modern urban and suburban settings are high-risk. They work only rarely; when they do, the result is powerful and original.