BOOK REVIEW : Collection Keys on Separations : DISTANT FRIENDS <i> by Greg Johnson</i> : Ontario Review Press, $17.95, 169 pages

Virtually every one of Greg Johnson’s haunting stories in “Distant Friends” explores and confronts a traumatic form of separation. The gulf opened between old friends Lex and Marty in the final story of the collection is only the most obvious of the lot.

Lex has no home, exactly, merely a home base in Boulder, Colo., which is not quite the same thing. He earns a modest income from a small apartment house and keeps his trust fund for luxuries. Marty has moved to a restored brownstone in New York, where he is overwhelmed by responsibility to his family and clients. Marty is a successful accountant, a devoted husband, and the father of a chronically ill child.

Marty’s little girl is in desperate straits when Marty phones his old buddy. Lex, as always, is available. You could actually call him a professional friend, since his only job seems to be providing support and good cheer. On this occasion, atypically, he drags his feet, driving cross-country instead of flying, stopping in Philadelphia for a one-night stand with a woman as fancy-free as he is. By the time he gets to the hospital, it’s too late. The friendship between the two men, having survived time, distance and tremendous personality differences, is finally undone by death. The man who has grown up, married, and lost a child no longer has anything in common with Lex, whose main problem is how to spend his inheritance. Still, Lex doesn’t quite get home free. “Later he would think that his sudden urge for flight, for distance, had shocked him as much as anything else that had happened.”

In “Passion Play,” Randall Trenner is also an escapee, but while Lex has done neither harm nor good, Randall’s case is more complex. He’s just lost his job and the woman with whom he lives is pressing for marriage. When he opens a letter from the handicaped sister he left behind in Georgia, he impulsively decides on an overdue visit. He returns to Georgia to find Melissa no longer a sweet tractable child but a willful, unmanageable woman of 40, complaining of ill-treatment and general anguish, neither so disabled that she cannot assert herself nor competent enough to live on her own. The elderly aunt left in charge can no longer cope. Melissa imagines herself in love with a married man who apparently beats her, and finally, sadly, Randall agrees that an institution is the only answer. Before this unnerving story ends, however, he finds a more satisfactory solution.

“The Metamorphosis” takes separation to its extremity. We encounter a terrified performer about to go on stage; we soon realize that he is a female impersonator suffering from a terror that has caused a previous mental breakdown. Here the theme of the outsider is carried to a Grand Guignol finale, a border only tentatively approached in the other stories.

“Grieving” returns the reader to a more familiar world, in which a recent widow meets a strange, waif-like girl at her husband’s grave. Curious, the widow befriends the mourner, only to discover that the girl was her husband’s lover, and that the quiet, well-ordered life the couple had enjoyed was a sham. By the time this brief interlude is over, the widow’s vision of herself is irrevocably altered and her superficially happy marriage revealed as a pathetic charade.

“A Summer Romance,” like “Crazy Ladies,” deals with mental illness. Like the physical suffering in “Distant Friends” and “Wintering,” psychosis serves the same purpose, providing the author with his most dramatic metaphors. Though the plot is classic, the resolution is contemporary, turning “A Summer Romance” into a tragicomedy of modern manners. Johnson’s ironic, disturbing stories speak directly to the generation reaching middle age--post-rebellion, post-selfishness, post-prosperity, post-everything.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction” edited by Terry McMillan (Viking).