BOOK REVIEW : Collection Captures Simple Lives in Shining Tales : BONNEVILLE BLUE <i> By Joan Chase</i> ; Farrar Straus & Giroux $16.95, 183 pages

Joan Chase’s richly expressive writing can intimidate its subject. In her two novels, “During the Reign of the Queen of Persia” and “The Evening Wolves,” she had a sweep of time and theme large enough so that the lives of her women could resonate. There was space to display the power and beauty, to absorb the occasional awkwardness, to farm out the exuberant crowding of image and sensibility.

Short stories, less roomy, cannot always take her lavish textures. There is an effect of emotional over-stress. It is like assembling a symphony orchestra in a glass shower stall; the nervy acoustics are overwhelmed.

This is true of some of the stories in “Bonneville Blue,” Chase’s first collection. It certainly is not true of the title story, which is a masterpiece. I will get to this one, and to others in which Chase does what she is so extremely good at--writing of marginal, constricted or frustrated lives as if these adjectives were simply shabby clothes worn by shining spirits.

But she can force the shining a little. “Jack Pine Savage” tells of a schoolteacher, aging and burdened with an ill wife, who finds he lacks the energy to drive his teen-age son to swimming practice at 5 a.m. each day. The boy, dreaming of championships, will have to drop from the team. It is a story with its own tight resonances, but, in the teacher’s evocation of his rugged logger ancestors, there is a large mystical resonance that seems to crowd its way in.

In “The Harrier,” the attraction between a woman in a small town and a hippie who settles there to do odd jobs is told with sketchy psychological development and a clangorous emotional tone. It is epiphany virtually from start to finish. There is a similar, seemingly forced emotional tension in “Crowing,” in which a woman takes a friend’s senile father for a walk, only to find a depth of malevolence in him that sends her into panic. Here too the language is overburdened.

“Her patience grinds in her teeth,” Chase writes of the woman as she tries to endure the old man’s company. “She thinks she tastes in her mouth a pulverized enamel of self-restraint.”

“Crowing” has a seed of mystery to it; so does “Ghost Dances,” which portrays a woman trying to manage a prairie horse farm and cope with a crippled, demented husband. But Chase fertilizes the seeds with a heavy charge of emotional tension, where the short story form gives them no room to grow. “An Energy Crisis” puts a similar overcharge of explosiveness in portraying an exhaustingly manic father and his exhausted family--a figure she used, to better effect, in “The Evening Wolves.”

Other stories, written more laconically, have greater impact. “Peach,” bittersweet, tells of a beautiful tomboy who organizes and holds together her girls’ baseball team. Puberty sets in, and her teammates desert one by one to attend the boys’ team practices. Peach goes around briefly with the boys’ captain, and then leaves town. The ending casts a red afterglow of anger and pain. In “The Whole of the World,” a similar glow lights up an old man’s futile and hare-brained gesture to assert his spent power against his sons-in-law.

They are lovely stories, but what carries the book and makes up for the weaker ones, is “Bonneville Blue.” It is set in a slummy neighborhood outside Washington at the time of the Vietnam War. Its inhabitants are a mix of blue-collar families, single working mothers and young people, hard up for cash and on the edge of the anti-war movement.

The story is told from the viewpoint of Irene, the hard-working wife of Big Jim, who is in construction. It is a lovely, layered account of the shifts and upheavals of the ‘60s as they lacerate the heart and pride of an instinctively patriotic working-class couple.

Irene is warm, expansive and indignant. She keeps the house spotless for Big Jim, makes him splendid lunches, and takes care of her teen-age children and--for extra money--the sickly child of Doreen, a single mother across the street who goes to work each morning and plays around afterward. She also helps Big Jim keep spotless his pride and joy: the big blue American car that sits in their driveway and is the closest thing to magnificence on the ramshackle street.

It also is a fading magnificence, and unfashionable. The hippies and students disapprove; somebody scrawls “Gas Hog” on the dust that, exceptionally, collects on the car one day. Big Jim explodes, bawls out Irene, and immediately is sorry. They are tender with each other; they sometimes sit in the blue Bonneville and neck, or go for late drives, revving it up to nearly 100 m.p.h. Irene would be happy to die that way, she thinks.

She wonders why her values seem to be challenged all around her; by the feckless Doreen, by the young peaceniks. “If folks wouldn’t stand up and be counted, before long the only ones left would be college graduates, women who had lost their men, nothing in the lot but foreign jobs that wouldn’t begin to hold anybody well grown.”

She is more than well grown, in fact, but attractive, certainly to Big Jim. As for the long-haired young men, “They could pretend they didn’t know she was alive but she’d caught them slipping her the once-over, half-embarrassed, like making petty withdrawals at a savings bank. Not one would have known how to manage a sizable balance.”

Irene’s voice is a marvel. Its spaciousness and color light up a story that though brief, is itself as spacious as a novella. Through her voice we see the politics and anti-politics of the ‘60s, the arrogance of class--coming at the working class, trickily, from below--and the sadness of all customs and assurances as time and the world turn on them.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Jane Fairfax” by Joan Aiken (St. Martin’s).