Grace Notes and Anxious Rhythms : AT THE GATES OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM <i> by Amy Hempel (Alfred A. Knopf: $17.95; 135 pp.) </i> : THIS IS ABOUT THE BODY, THE MIND, THE SOUL, THE WORLD, TIME AND FATE <i> by Diane Williams (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: $15.95; 112 pp.) </i>

Fiction now has an eccentric reticence to rival that which poetry had in Marianne Moore; fiction’s belongs to Amy Hempel.

Where Moore’s evasiveness was abstract and intellectual, decisively principled, Hempel’s economy comes across less as decision than reaction--some wised-up constriction of the heart dictates these anxious rhythms.

In “Reasons to Live,” a first collection published in 1985, Hempel showed herself a chronicler of degrees of demoralization that had previously escaped contemporary fiction’s increasingly fine sieve. The stories’ originality seemed to lie partly in the shrewdness of their irony, hitting on a fit subject, and partly in the worldly sadness of irony directed at everything in general.

So how is irony faring in Hempel’s new collection, “At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom”? The stories are again smartly observed, cryptically titled, the prose as tight as if it fears spilling a single drop. The settings continue to be Californian or nominally Midwestern, urban or suburban, vague except when a beach flashes onto the page.

Hempel’s ear for subverted homilies remains keen: “Every time you see a beautiful woman, someone is tired of her, so the men say.” The stories are still rife with weird facts: The narrator of “The Most Girl Part of You” can casually tell her boyfriend, Big Guy, how “Egyptians used to split stone--how they tunneled under a boulder and chipped a narrow fissure in the underside of the rock. How they lit a fire there, let it slow-burn for several days. How, when they poured cold water on top of the rock, the thing cracked clean as lightning.”

Big Guy’s mother “. . . died eight days ago. She did it herself. Big Guy showed me the rope burns in the beam of the ceiling. He said: ‘Any place I hang myself is home.’ ” Improbably, in telling his son this news, Big Guy’s father “. . . had added, ‘And what’s more, the Cubs lost.’ ” Throughout the story, grief is the source for itchy, escalating comedy, with Big Guy sewing the narrator’s name onto the back of his hand in a perverse valentine.

The boyfriend-girlfriend exchanges are so fast and knowing--Hepburn and Tracy as suicidal adolescents--that they deaden hope, especially the old romantic hope that lovers can invent a private way out of everything that’s wrong.

As the two are about to make love for the first time, “I make light of what could happen. I say the cool thing I’ve been saving up to say; I say, ‘Stop it, Big Guy. Stop it some more.’ ” Yet at the story’s end, preemptive irony mercifully relents: “. . . and if it’s true your life flashes before your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to be truly alive.”

“Du Jour,” “To Those of You Who Missed Your Connecting Flights Out of O’Hare” and “Murder” are brief monologues in the particular rueful first-person that Hempel copyrighted in “Reasons to Live.” In these, the speakers are more or less lost, displaced but not disoriented, the tone whimsical, attitude cool, skepticism practiced: They amount to rapid hits of disenchantment.

Yet one aspect of Hempel’s nonchalance, her surface aversion to literary effects, masks an unusually quick-witted sense of the possible uses of epiphany. Seeming aimlessness spins off nicely aphoristic bits: “Jean said, ‘Men.’ She said, ‘They hate you at first. But all you have to do is be funny and sad and tall and thin and short and fat and wear them down, wear them down.’ ” A certain sniping wistfulness with which women comment on men is precisely rendered; if men often fail to like them enough, Hempel’s women like each other.

In fact, sources of consolation in the lives of women, and kinds of damage endured, are not new subjects for Hempel, but her interest in them appears un-worn-down. It may even be a degree more urgent. In “The Harvest,” the story of the scarring of the narrator’s knee in a car accident--the car driven by a man she’s known a week, the damage considered in terms of her “marriageability”--is undercut by a second account, in which a kind of ars poetica is advanced: “I leave out a lot when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story.”

Where excision is the method, it’s hinted; then a little exposure carries the force of revelation. The second tale purports to be “the version that has room for perfect irony,” as if the narrator is relishing using those savagely dead-on ironies that real life, not fiction--which suffers from the need to remain credible--dishes out. The problem is that the story’s tone can’t accommodate the shift; it remains watchfully self-amused, which doesn’t seem enough to come from this dose of cruel “truth.”

In “The Day I Had Everything,” a kind of all-female survivors’ club snaps up each others’ terrible stories. Teller and listeners alike are bound by the camaraderie of injury, at least until the end, when the narrator offers only, “I met someone . . . I’m happy. I think I’m in love,” and, with lovely suddenness, her listeners shriek with--glee.

Empathy, spontaneity, expectations that are not defeated, love that’s insightful--these are radically new elements in Hempel’s stories that have sometimes too closely resembled “cool things saved up to say.” In “At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom,” Hempel’s nonpareil portraits of wary depression have grown more generous. The possibility that breezes through her characters’ lives is a peculiarly fresh sort, braving, as it does, a world of hurt.

Volumes dubbed by their publishers as “astonishing collections” are getting shorter. Diane Williams’ first collection, “This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate,” with its mockingly capacious title, weighs in at just more than 100 pages. Few of its tales run longer than three pages; a number are five or six tense paragraphs. There are no epiphanies, only blackouts. The mood is never less than edgy, and it sometimes rises to real horror.

A little way into the collection, the reader begins to suspect that these nervous snippets of discourse, scissored from some very weird contexts indeed, are obsessed with the body, the mind--and, to revise the list, with disillusionment, sex, responsibility, violence, and disconnectedness. The subjects range from a lawn party at which a woman observes her husband’s girlfriend feeding him steak tartare to a woman’s “somewhat hacked body . . . in (an) institutional-size freezer, adjacent to the stove.”

Several of the stories offer racy first sentences. “At the post office the woman finally got a good long look at the monster, a stare,” begins “Intercourse,” and “The Uses of Pleasure” announces right off the bat: “So that’s why there is no simultaneous orgasm of hardly any or so rarely--when I can be detached, I can laugh about all those times when you want somebody and then they don’t want you and then vice versa.”

This taunting, seemingly unedited intimacy eggs the reader on, and the brief scenes that follow are trance-like, varying from slightly paranoid spiels to confessions that have the eerie defenselessness of moments from an analysand’s stream-of-consciousness.

In “All American,” a vignette of two sisters alone in the back of the family car, parked in the garage, is viewed as the source of the narrator’s adult attempts to coerce intimacy. “I was trying to kiss my sister . . . I must have been getting rough, because she was getting hysterical. I remember I was surprised. I remember knowing then that I was applying force and getting away with it.” Past violence is juxtaposed against ongoing violence, but the narrator’s compulsion is not a matter of character or psychology, and just barely a matter of narrative; it’s simply left shining in a cold, arbitrary light, as of momentarily fascinated attention.

In “Glass of Fashion,” the speaker is distracted from her father’s imminent death by “. . . the doctor’s body in her jeans. She had what I thought was a girlish and perfect form in her jeans, an enviable form.” This form--the body in its animal vitality--is envied just before the narrator learns that her father “does not know who he once was. He does not feel grief or frustration. He does not know who you are.” Distractedness--the narrator’s vulnerability to involuntary, irrelevant perceptions--is the first manifestation of grief, because what has been lost, of course, is the father’s soul.

The difficult trick of these stories, then, is to lure the reader’s attention into sync with the narrators’, so that reader and narrator alike experience some meaning in the collage-like method. Where this works--as it does in “Pornography,” “The Kind You Know Forever” and “Dropping the Masters”--the effect is original, as if a strange little memory has insinuated itself into the reader’s own memory, to remain there as a jagged little shard, incapable of assimilation. Its sharp edges reveal to the reader just how smoothly thoughtless and vague our sense of ourselves habitually is, and how much strangeness we absorb without hesitation.

These fictional chips, so un-pretty, glitter with a shiny, irreducible strangeness that wills us to think twice.