BOOK REVIEW : 1 Writer, Many Voices Make Up Collection : NO GUARANTEES,<i> by Melissa Lentricchia</i> . William Morrow and Co. $16.95, 182 pages

Not content to be merely versatile, Melissa Lentricchia reaches for ventriloquism in her first collection of short fiction. The result is a one-woman anthology of 10 stories so varied in style and tone that each seems an experiment; only “Relatives” and “A Love Story in One Act” having anything in common. Both these stories happen in an Italian-American milieu, an atmosphere in which the author seems both at home and at ease.

“Relatives” is told in the altogether authentic voice of a homosexual family member, re-creating his all-too-brief love affair with a distant cousin. While the narrator is secure and accepted by his relations, his lover is “Lucky” in name only, still tormented by a mother who calls on holidays “to say things like, ‘Happy New Year from the mother you killed.’ ” Satiric and poignant by turns, “Relatives” is an altogether original take on a newly classic theme. In “A Love Story,” the projected voice is raucously, hilariously female, an amateur opera singer’s sweetie vamping the cop who investigates a suspicious accident involving the singer’s archenemy--the critic who savages his performances and his avoirdupois.

“The Golden Robe” takes place in the mind of a Mexican woman working as a maid in Marina del Rey. Here the mood is a heady mix of pathos and melodrama; areas notoriously difficult to negotiate successfully. “Red Horse Running Through Water” presents the mysterious tale of the death of Raymond White Eagle. This time Lentricchia has adopted a kind of Indian syntax: “On the first night Jack began at what he thought was the beginning that would carry him straight and smooth to the end. . . .” This counterproductive exercise turns a solemn and mournful story into a Hemingway parody. “No-Chickens-to-Count-Blues” is offered as an “anti-fable,” a curious category in which the moral remains permanently elusive.

“Wandalinda” is a physical therapist who runs away with Gypsies to become a palm reader, a discipline for which she has a truly amazing aptitude. Until recently plain Linda Miller, this character is one of the author’s most felicitous creations. “From You Know Who” explores the dark underside of country life from the point of view of an aged and vindictive spinster. Here the characters are not only remarkable but believable, leaving the reader dazzled and disconcerted. Striving for a similarly chilling effect, “Some Enchanted Evening” undermines itself by beginning with its end, thus depriving the story of a crucial element of suspense. “Ole’ Henry” introduces us to a woman academic obsessed with Henry James. You have to sympathize with a character whose “thing with Henry began in medias res, when soon-to-be Gloria was more or less in graduate school at NYU, verging virginally on 30, going by the name of Ricky or sometimes Rickety, her hair wild, red, her clothes ranch-style bohemian, her demeanor incognito and incommunicado, her essays all in one way or another about the fleetingness of phallic images.” A writer who realizes that a monograph by a Ricky on James would be a mistake must be on the right track, if she’ll only stick to it.

Previously published in small literary magazines, these stories are clearly the work of an author diligently exploring style and form in an attempt to discover the mode that suits her best. In the Italian ethnic pieces and her excursions into the hearts of society’s female rebels, she seems to have found precisely what she’s seeking.