BOOK REVIEW : A Collection of Domestic Pain Delivers a Thud of Recognition : THE FIREMAN’S WIFE And Other Stories <i> by Richard Bausch</i> Linden Press/Simon & Schuster $17.95, 205 pages

One of the things the short story has been particularly fitted for since the days of Chekhov is writing up the small movements of the soul. Small, but not insignificant. The shift of the two-penny nail topples horse and king.

A soul doesn’t move all that frequently, though. Staking out its burrow, the writer can grow impatient and seize upon the first stirring as a sign of it. For every soul, there are a dozen less interesting creatures popping out: your web-footed temper, your dinky-breathed mood.

Richard Bausch, who has written some good novels and a set of sensitive short stories, under the title of “Spirits”--some were souls, as well--has made some largely lower-grade sightings in this new collection, “The Fireman’s Wife.” The stories tend to be domestic, and to treat of the creak of relationships coming apart or, even more painfully, holding together.

The author knows all he needs to know about such things. He delivers the recognition that Henry James defined as one of the two great functions of literature; the other being surprise. It is not usually a shock of recognition; more often it is a thud.

In two of the stories, Bausch shows love leaching out of young marriages. “The Eyes of Love” is an extended quarrel, more in signs and silences than in words. The strains between the husband and wife come out in the ride home after a cookout at his family’s house. She detested the party and showed it; irritation is followed by outburst followed by reconciliation. At the end of it all, the man senses the stirring of a permanent estrangement.

Something similar happens in “The Fireman’s Wife.” A young wife feels excluded from the self-sufficient camaraderie of her husband and his two shift mates at the firehouse. Then the husband is injured in a fire, and one of his friends is killed. He turns to his wife for solace; his sudden warmth suddenly precipitates her coldness.

The mechanism of bonds fraying is well described but clinical. We don’t feel that the bonds are holding anything that matters. Nor is the rivalry of a father and son, both prima donnas, in “The Brace,” likely to concern a reader very much. Bausch’s characters furnish their relationships; they rarely inhabit them. They make too few claims of charm, intelligence, wit, sadness, passion or experience upon us to provide a sense of particularity.

When the author tries for larger feelings, he tends to misjudge. “Letter to the Lady of the House” is a reverse on the three stories already cited. Instead of leaching out of a stormy marriage, love leaches back in. At 70, a man writes a letter telling his wife that seeing her asleep has transfigured the rifts and aridity of their life together. The writing is civilized; the conclusion mawkish.

“Design” tells of an edgy, routine-dulled middle-aged priest who finds himself intensely irritated by an old but sprightly Baptist minister who is his neighbor. The priest has spared himself all his life; the old man, who is dying, never stops taking risks. At the end, the priest breaks down, weeping, and finds a kind of absolution in the old man’s puzzled embrace. The priest’s acedia is low-grade J. F. Powers; his deliverance is less than that; it is both over-prepared and unearned.

In “Luck,” which tells of a young house painter trying to cover up for the alcoholic father who works with him, an ironic twist at the end manages only to accentuate the willed pathos. The irony is better in “Wedlock,” when a woman takes refuge from a difficult marriage in a second marriage with an apparently simple and good-humored younger man. She wants someone who won’t see through her; on their honeymoon, she discovers that she can’t see through him . “Old West,” funny for awhile and then drooping, is a reverse on “Shane”: Here, Shane is a bum and the hero-worshiping boy is a liar.

The best piece in the collection is “Consolation.” A young widow takes her baby to visit her dead husband’s parents. Their standoffishness bruises her, until she realizes it is a different form of her own frozen grieving. The story is subtle and moving--with a fine comic turn by the widow’s bossy and self-centered sister--even if the warmth at the end is a shade over insistent.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “The Picture Makers” by Emily Ellison (William Morrow).