BOOK REVIEW : Dazzling Tales of Life’s Walking Wounded : TYPICAL, <i> by Padgett Powell</i> . Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $19, 207 pages

Nearly every other page in Padgett Powell’s first collection of stories yields a brilliant passage, often just a few words long but occasionally going on for paragraphs.

There’s the man who strolls a riverbank in the rainy season, “grabbing the good things a flood can bring,” only to find himself catching a beautiful woman--desirable despite the fact that she’s dead. There’s the writer (no doubt sitting alone at his desk) writing, “ Now is a scary item if ever there was one. I have, I suspect, never not miffed the now. Now is too fast for me.” There’s the laborer, a house painter apparently, who says “All things which someone other than yourself must be entrusted to do are frightening, and all things which you alone must do are terrifying.” Desperation underlies these lives, but Powell’s characters--most of them men of crazy or near-crazy imagination--are brave in their attempts to define a place in the world, however small.

The extractions and interpretations given above don’t do justice to Powell’s work, but that statement should not be taken as an unequivocal compliment, for the stories in “Typical” are hit-and-miss. Although Powell’s language, in the great Southern tradition, is uniformly remarkable--his novels “Edisto” and “A Woman Named Drown” had many critics on their feet--his narration often spins into wild, literary virtuosity that only lovers of art-for-art’s-sake can admire. At their best, however, these stories are both hilarious and sobering, for they illuminate the thought patterns, internally consistent but externally bizarre, of modern life’s walking wounded.

In “Wayne’s Fate,” when a roofer sees--or at least believes he sees--his partner fall off a dormer peak and decapitate himself, it somehow makes sense that he should open his client’s refrigerator in search of a beer and remark of the vegetables he sees there, “If it weren’t for McDonald’s, iceberg lettuce wouldn’t have no luck at all.” The ability to cope, here, is enough, and to run on at the mouth a kind of success.

Running on at the mouth is, of course, also what Powell does as a writer, and the stories in which he catches characters in defining moments can be dazzling. “Mr. Irony” is a tour de force, an exploration of the craft of writing that doubles as a satire on Esquire magazine (where at least one of the stories in “Typical” was first published).

This story’s narrator can’t quite decide whose voice to take while describing a surreal, globe-trotting adventure; he starts out as an apprentice writer trying to set down the perfect sequence of words, flirts with speaking from the point of view of a pathetic pulp-worker on a log truck and in the end can’t escape being the virtual amanuensis of the eponymous, Ken Kesey-like Mr. Irony, who knows everything--including, it seems, the fact that writers’ inventions are much more compelling than their observations.

Powell’s best stories tend to be of two kinds; the long and elaborate, in which characters have the time to develop believable attitudes of their own, and those about writing, a subject about which Powell, obviously, is an expert.

The major exception to the first rule is “Wait,” a two-page tale ostensibly about a dog’s attack on a corncob. Like many stories in “Typical,” “Wait” centers on the complexities and incongruities of language, but Powell gives it significance by casting the story as a dialogue between a literary stylist and an impatient listener.

The writer gives an almost baroque description of the act, saying (in part) that the corncob was “Not halved so much as no longer whole , as if in the authority of the bite was contained the undoing of natural history”; his audience responds impatiently, “God, man. Say it. . . . I’d have me a dog done kill a horse by now, drag a man out a burning house.”

“Wait” should be required reading at every fiction-writing program in the country, for it captures in a few strokes the difficulty every fiction writer, at some point, must face up to--the awkward gulf between what authors intend and their readers find.

Next: Amy Wallace reviews “Theo and Matilda” by Rachel Billington (HarperCollins).