8 Stories That Will Perk You Up, Up, Up : THE MATTER IS LIFE, <i> by J. California Cooper,</i> Doubleday, $18, 227 pages

These stories are jazzy, clubby, folksy, small towny, populist, perky, and if you don’t like them, you must be in an absolutely unshakable bad mood.

Indeed, if you approach them in a bad mood to begin with, you might get a case of the cultural bends, because J. California Cooper dedicates these eight stories to 26 personages, including Patti LaBelle, Pharoah Akhnaton, 13 of her cats (Muggins, Icy, La La and so on), Dian Fossey’s gorillas and all the Untouchables of India. Two pages later, she acknowledges 23 more people, including “Jehovah God.”

If you’re feeling on the sour side, all this sweetness could give you the pip. (Which reminds me, Cooper also dedicates “The Matter Is Life” to Gladys Knight, but not the Pips. What happened? I guess you have to draw the line someplace.)

In an author’s note, Cooper writes: “Some people say it takes courage to face the matter of death . . . . I believe it takes more courage to face life. To survive the everyday matters of the mind, body and heart.” Cooper’s stories are about the “everyday” and they address the black experience. They’re colloquial, talky, goofy, full of dots, dashes, dialect spellings, exclamation points and even musical notes. They’re almost always told in the first person, and usually with a female voice. (But a couple of guys here blab on, to their detriment.) The settings are generally Southern and rural, but characters mosey north to Chicago and over to Paris, France.

In “The Big Day,” a 95-year-old lady is dragged out to a friend’s funeral. She loves every minute of the drive and the terrific service, but keeps crabbily repeating, “I’m not ready!” Of course, it’s Death she’s talking to.

In “How Why to Get Rich” a family of black kids spends a day in the fields, picking onions, and can barely earn enough money to pay for the bus fare back to town. If this is what being poor is, forget it. There has to be a better way to get to a better life.

But being black and being a woman present a couple of problems in a world where--let’s face it--the setup is generally rigged to favor white men. And, wait a minute, when we’re talking about being rich, what exactly does that mean?

“Friends, Any One,” and “Vanity” take a look at what happens when you just go for the gold, get those fancy clothes, buy that fur coat, heap on the jewelry. If you start selling your body, you’re going to end up in bad shape. If you don’t love your husband and he doesn’t love you, your mink coat can’t keep you warm. And if, as in “I Told Him,” you throw in your lot with a bad husband, that won’t work out, the whole world knows.

The longest story is about “The Doras,” who start with one hard- working Dora, whose mom was just out of slavery. Dora starts out with one foot in the orphanage, finds a man, works like a slave for him, has three daughters and, later, one more. Widowed now, she names her girls after herself--since she’s the matriarch in essentially a matriarchal society. Lovedora, Windora, Endora, Splendora.

These girls, as in any fable or fairy tale, look around for what they can do best. Lovedora lives for love, poor thing. Windora designs clothes, makes money, goes blind. Endora is lazy and marries a druggist. Splendora, the most beautiful, goes to Paris, uses her beauty and sweetness wisely. She puts the family together again so that they can raise a whole new generation of Doras.

Halfway between gossip and fairy tales, brimming with faith and high spirits, “The Matter of Life” clues us in on the lives of black women. Buy it. I loved it.

Next: Bettyanne Kevles reviews “The Dinosaur Man: Tales of Madness and Enchantment from the Back Ward” by Susan Baur (HarperCollins).