BOOK REVIEW : Tepid Pondering of Middle Age : WHAT WAS MINE Short Stories<i> by Ann Beattie</i> Random House $20, 237 pages

The minimalist style is literature’s version of the simmer. The water’s surface is barely troubled, yet at any moment it may burst into furious activity. It is passion told with rigorous stillness; repressed, the agitation endures.

Ann Beattie’s latest collection of stories is a simmer that has gone off. The fire is out, and the water is tepid.

The stories in “What Was Mine,” mostly dealing with men and women past their youth and approaching middle age, are marked by Beattie’s skill with the nuances of emotional maneuver. In her best writing, the maneuvers register the emotion while concealing it. Here, they don’t have much to conceal.

In “Imagine a Day at the End of Your Life,” a retired man finds he no longer plays much part in life. His successful author wife and his grown children seem to have no real need for him. He turns to collecting autumn leaves and paying special attention to the flights of birds.

In “In Amalfi” a woman, no longer quite young and married to a much older man, sits in an Italian seaside cafe, notes the flirtatiousness of the beach boys, drinks white wine and stares out to sea. And she thinks of a story she once read about an American woman in Italy who “was sad and refused to be made happy,” and she wonders if she is just such a predictable type.

Both these stories are written with intelligence and grace, but as portraits of aging regret, they lack real faces to wear the regret. The characters, here and in some of the more complex stories, are too abstract for their feelings to matter.

“Honey” presents Elizabeth, in her 40s and also married to an older man, trying to get the claims of her life and of her longings to accommodate themselves around a single table. In this case, the table is a pair of outdoor parties.

Elizabeth has dented her husband’s car, her daughter is angry at her, her young quasi-lover--they have done little more than flirt--has come with his fiancee, an older man has invited her to lunch on what might be a tryst but isn’t quite, and the whole party is attacked by bees. There are any number of emotional twists and turns, a swarm of barely lulled injuries, and the buzzing--like the bees, of course--of curtailed imbroglios. But it is hard to care.

The same is true of the anxious, compulsive protagonist of “Horatio’s Trick.” She is a familiar figure, an insatiable worrier and a clinging mother who tries hard not to cling. Beattie gives her a garish touch or two, writes a nourishing party scene, and portrays her grown son’s efforts to help his mother face her problems--she, like several other of the protagonists in the stories, drinks too much. But it is a tired effort with a cliched ending.

Several of the stories are brief vignettes. In one, a man doing the lighting for his artist brother’s installation realizes how he always has been the family workhorse. In another, a young couple moves into a decaying neighborhood and receives a visit from an outlandish welcome-wagon woman who tells them that their arrival is a sign of rejuvenation. Their marriage, however--it is the young woman’s third--is on the point of breaking up.

“Home to Marie” is a flimsy story about a man who takes his wife for granted, often misses dinner, and wonders why she gets so angry. It is redeemed by the wife’s comic and utterly appropriate revenge.

The best story in the collection is “You Know What.” It tells of a husband who takes care of the house and of his young daughter, while his wife works on the advertising career that supports them. Beattie gives appealing portraits of husband and wife, of the universe that separates them, and of the tenderness that spans the universe without fully bridging it.

This story, along with “What Is Mine,” about a woman who frustrates the paternal love of her lover for her son, bears real marks of life. In two of the most complex and, in some ways, artful of the stories--”Television” and “Windy Day at the Reservoir”--a series of winding psychological tunnels and cutoffs are laid out. The reader is invited to track the quarry down; but the author has failed to give this quarry scent or savor enough to encourage the effort.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Portrait of the Artist With My Wife” by Simon Mason (G.P. Putnam’s Sons).