Random Harvest : THE INCUBATOR BALLROOM: A Novella and Four Stories <i> By John Rolfe Gardiner</i> ; <i> (Alfred A. Knopf: $20; 172 pp.) </i>

Most of the stories in John Rolfe Gardiner’s new fiction collection, “The Incubator Ballroom,” first appeared in The New Yorker and, despite its occasional smugness, that grand dame is America’s finest fiction magazine.

Gardiner’s earlier work has attracted considerable critical notice. In these stories, sentence after sentence is musical, and subtle, and skilled. Look at this paragraph from “Our Janice,” the story of Janice Wheatly, a poor girl from West Virginia who goes to work for the Elliots, who are wealthy, liberal, fecund and blond:

“The old log and stone house had been remodeled for stylish country living. Mr Elliot said a Southern General had ridden his horse into the front hall and straight out the back door in pursuit of chicken thieves. Janice could see that such a ride today would require a leap into the backyard over two heat pumps outside the back door, which blew warm and cool air, according to season, through fourteen rooms.”

Or consider a young girl’s love of farming in the title novella:

“There were things she shouldn’t have to explain. Morning light on the new green-and-yellow machines. Their rhythm and counter-rhythm over the hills, the rake rattling off a windrow for the baler thumping its mechanical appetite in another field.”

I am usually a sucker for prose like this, usually willing to forgive its writer anything. But I found Gardiner’s stories precious, unlikely and dull.

Gardiner takes as his theme the conflict of rural and urban values in northern Virginia. In one story, “Karaghalo’s Daughter,” a retired Hungarian gangster plants pecan trees in the path of the local hunt. In “World After Dark,” naive back-to-the-landers discover a cross burned in their field. “The Incubator Ballroom,” the title novella, follows the fortunes of a Roanoke society family who uproot themselves (I gather this is during the ‘60s) and settle on a farm outside Winchester, Va.

Some years later, their daughter, Grace, begins “real farming” on the place, “making three cuttings (of alfalfa) in each of her first two years, giving orders to the sky, ‘Don’t you rain now!’ or ‘Let it pour!’ And the rains had come with a gracious timeliness, holding off, giving the new-mown alfalfa time to cure, then coming on to push up a new crop.”

But when Grace’s mother pulls out of her marriage, the farm--all but the farmhouse and a few weedy acres--have to be sold to developers. This makes everybody in the family quite rich, but Grace is dissatisfied. Grace wants to farm, you see, and she’s so keen, she’ll marry so she can go on farming.

If Grace were better drawn, the reader could care more when her plans fall through. But Grace is no more than an excuse for Gardiner’s musical prose. The farm she is supposed to love so much is never even described.

Last week, out in Ohio, I was talking to a real farmer, a good farmer, and he said to me: “You ever notice how a farmer can’t stop looking at his land? He’ll know all the good views.” But Grace only cares about the big John Deere machines; her idea of how farming is done is the farming you read in the tractor dealer’s equipment catalogue.

I do not think Gardiner cares that his characters are unrealistic, that many of the events he describes are implausible. I think that all he cares about is the music.

The story “World After Dark” hinges on a farmer discovering a wonderful bit of rural science and then, unaccountably, never mentioning it to a soul. I suppose it is possible that this farmer never goes into the convenience store, never swaps tales with the boys down at the feed store, but it’s not likely. Rural America is The Land of No Secrets.

Or take the preacher who almost marries Grace and her fiance. Now here is a preacher who is openly and contemptuously rude to a local millionairess and the son of the John Deere dealer. The preacher doesn’t have any reason for being rude, he just happens to be feeling that way. A millionairess and the son of the John Deere dealer are rural aristocracy in my part of the country, and any preacher goes around treating them bad would soon get a call to another parish.

These aren’t minor flaws. Gardiner calls people farmers who don’t act like farmers, invents a fox hunt that doesn’t behave the way fox hunters behave. Gardiner reinvents the countryside.

I do hear an echo of Chekhov in Gardiner’s tales, but it’s a faint echo. We get none of Chekhov’s passion or human good sense. We do get the music, but that’s not enough.