Truncated Travails of an American Boy : ECONOMIES OF THE HEART <i> by Christopher Zenowich (Harper & Row: $16.95; 256 pp.; 0-06-016243-0) </i>

A volume of linked short stories about an American boy growing into early manhood might very well (as this one does) bring to mind that lean and influential prototype of the genre, Hemingway’s “In Our Time.” Of course, a vast sweep of history has passed since Hemingway’s book appeared in 1925, and differences are to be expected, in fact required and wanted. One only wishes, by the end, that the differences here--the deep ones--might be somewhat less disheartening.

Here, Christopher Zenowich takes up, story by story, the childhood and adolescence of one Bob Bodewicz (central character also of Zenowich’s 1989 novel, “The Cost of Living”). Bodewicz’s introductions to life, as it happens, occur not in upper Michigan around the time of World War I, but in Connecticut, around Litchfield, starting in the 1950s and coming down toward the present.

Like Nick Adams, Bodewicz has parents whom he simultaneously admires and feels oppressed by (Bob’s father, uncouth in manner and quick with the hand in his child-rearing, is a factory worker); and, like Nick Adams, Bob Bodewicz is left, at the end of his own book of initiation tales, pondering the way he’ll live the rest of his life, and the values he’ll live it by.

The big trouble is that one feels, by the end, that Bob has not so much grown in sensitivity or perception or resolve but rather that he is in fact gradually becoming limited and narrowed: That’s the disheartening part, keeping this often talented and frequently charming book, too, from quickening fully into life.

Some of the early stories have about them an attentiveness to small and hidden moments in Bob’s life that suggest an emerging singularity and compelling inner awareness of character--in short, moments that make Bob interesting and complex. This isn’t true in the broadly played conventionality of “Think Big” (Bob hopes to make lots of money by raising chinchillas in the basement), but in “Pete the Painter,” details take hold that show the boy’s private awareness of life, and of its mysterious power to cause suffering, starting to evolve. (Because he’s interested in rocks, his parents arrange for him to be tutored in geology by a local inventor and retired high school science teacher--who is himself stoically dying of a hideous and crippling disease.)

The same suggestiveness is true, too, of “Earning Power,” in which Bob earns spending money on a Sunday afternoon by sweeping out the deserted factory where his father works during the week. Making his way from the upper floors downward, the boy explores this old world of grimy commerce as he goes, and in the basement he comes upon rats, one of which, albino-eyed and blind, he manages to kill--earning a moment of grudging but much-valued praise from his rough and hyper-critical father.

Symbols continue to abound in the remaining stories as well, but less often does Bob’s presence as an intuitively responding character grow in complexity or depth along with them. In fact it seems subtly to diminish. A family relative named Apley runs a successful farm, and the remainder of the book chronicles the string of calamitous events that bring about its decline.

Working as a part-time farmhand (he’s now in high school), Bob is witness to this gradual fall--as, first, Apley’s beautiful and ambitious daughter-in-law (she wanted to be a singer) is disfigured and left permanently retarded by a car wreck; as Apley’s son Ted then falls into alcoholism and loses his will to take over the farm; as Trudy, Apley’s scarcely-more-than-a-cipher wife, falls prey to the seductions of a cheap evangelist and runs off with him forever, taking along $30,000 from the farm’s account.

All of this Hardy-esque bad luck is conveyed believably enough, but another crucial and more subtle element, having to do with Bob’s growth and awakening, tends to level out and weaken into standardisms as these gratuitous thunderbolts keep striking. In the closing line of a story called “Bats,” in what one expects ought to be a quietly pivotal and revelatory moment, Bob thinks: “He knew now that which he had never known himself, that after all this, there would be questions--why, why did this happen?” The odd circularity and peculiar obviousness of the line suggests what’s disappeared--that Bob in essence has stopped growing, stopped thinking, stopped being capable of a private or willed or passionate or principled change in response to the sordid and needful world he finds around him.

Zenowich continues to put Bob, often skillfully, through stories whose events and symbols hint at that world of hazard and risk, but try as he might, he can’t break successfully into an inner Bob, a Bob whose passions might somehow summon themselves up or change as a result. Bob spends long days picking stones out of a field (“Field Work”), spends whole nights waiting vainly to shoot raccoons who’ve been eating the corn (“Night Work”) and almost--heart-stoppingly--falls while shingling a building (“On the Roof”).

But by book’s end, what does he want, and what will he do? What has the education of Bob Bodewicz come to? He’ll go to college but find it vaguely a disappointment. And he’ll imagine, in a small concluding flurry of platitudes, a life where “at the end . . . you came out with money. And love. And with the sense that every bad break had been made worthwhile.”

Out of this crucible has come, then--what? Little more, it seems, than a wan and dreamy wistfulness, whether by author’s intent or not. Closing the volume, one fears that there just wasn’t, in truth, very much to Bob to start with.