A Poor Connection Is Better Than None : THE TENNESSEE WALTZ And Other Stories <i> by Alan Cheuse (Peregrine Smith: $16.95; 150 pp.) </i>

Communication is a central theme in Alan Cheuse’s compassionate collection, “The Tennessee Waltz and Other Stories.” His characters attempt to communicate through half-truths and misconceptions, through slides and tapes; they don’t say the words that matter to them and avoid questions that could bring them painful answers; they shield themselves from intimacy and form connections that are fueled by longing and disappointment.

By far the strongest of the stories is “Land of Cotton,” a powerful and moving account of a man’s resolution to leave his family for his male lover. Told from his wife’s perspective, the story chronicles the family’s return trip to Nashville from a vacation in New England. The tension between Val and Len manifests itself in their children--Cheerball, Sneez and Weepy--who are penned up in the back seat of the Toyota wagon. “What chaos the kids failed to achieve she had conjured up herself in her heart.”

Len’s participation in the trip is a reluctant compromise born out of guilt and the obligation to see his family home safe before he joins his lover. In a tender and ruthless leave-taking, he divests himself of his wife. “She felt the sudden pressure of darkness, not just in the room but beyond the lamps of the parking lot, beyond and above Virginia, the cold season stretching out to all points west and south, up and down. A child sobbed, and she rocked it--she rocked.”

Cheuse, author of four previous books, shows his characters in moments of not connecting or connecting in awkward and insufficient ways that often illuminate the chaos of their lives beyond the encounters.

A pudgy law student, rejected by his intimidating father, a general, tries to protect his mother by forming an uneasy alliance with his wealthy stepmother.

Kann, a divorced father involved with a woman who is efficient when it comes to “computations such as the tax on the long-distance portions of telephone bills,” longs for his 5-year-old daughter and feels tormented in his attempts to stay connected to her “over lines stretched beneath the earth three thousand some miles between.”

Andy, an adulterer, realizes, “I’d backed into romance and a marriage and family with Arlene the way I used to find my way around the streets of a big city like New York, bumped and shoved and half-crushed by others.” His lover, Sue Beth, suspended in a real and aching moment, tells herself, “Sometimes it seems like our lives were made of trying to be music, but nobody was singing now.”

Several of the male characters are bewildered, passive men who try to muddle through life, accommodating outrageous requests from women. Alman, an American journalist in Mexico, still aching from a failed relationship, becomes the naive target of two women: a Mexican who steals his typewriter and an American who persuades him to escort her back across the border and foists her infant onto him before she disappears. The irony--a baby in return for a typewriter--is delicately handled by the author, and so is Alman’s grave acceptance of the child when he bathes it in the sink of a Phoenix bus stop. “Dabbing water on its brow, he took a deep breath and gave the child an old-fashioned masculine name.”

The relationship between men and children is convincingly explored in several other stories. Joseph, the widowed father of a young son, becomes involved in a crisis between one of the day-care workers who looks after his son and her violent husband. Both Alman and Joseph are generous and passive men who are drawn into already existing complications in women’s lives without losing their dignity.

Their acute loneliness takes Cheuse’s characters into the fringes of the lives of others and turns them into spectators, dreamers. They cope with losses: the loss of a child, the loss of parents, the loss of an inattentive new husband during a Music City tour. A country singer, glimpsed from the tour bus, becomes more real to Brenda, a lonely bride, “even in memory, than her recollection of the sleeping Billy back at the motel.” For her, the portraits in the Country Music Hall of Fame and museum feel like a “family album.”

A young mother, April, is married to a man who “likes to look at things that appear to have been flung down in front of him, attempting in his drawings to catch the world on the edge of disarray of motion.” Manipulated by her husband’s needs, she lives her life through his and takes on the responsibility for his support. She arrives at a crucial moment of identification with her despised alcoholic mother.

Although Cheuse explores connections that are inevitable, unsettling and ultimately disappointing, “The Tennessee Waltz and Other Stories” transcends the bleakness of the characters’ lives through moments of individual dignity that are beautifully rendered.