FICTION

FAR-FLUNG STORIES by Peter Cameron (Harper Collins: $19.95; 192 pp.) .

In these 12 stories, Peter Cameron unwittingly demonstrates the importance of character in fiction. Far-flung indeed, they are set in New York City, the Midwest, Canada, even Africa. But Cameron’s descriptions of these places are too spare and flat to add an extra dimension to his people. Nor does plot help much. His people react rather than make things happen; they have been nudged out of the mainstream by divorce, others’ deaths or failed love affairs, and they circle suspended in life’s eddies. This wouldn’t matter if the people themselves were fascinating. But many of them--especially the younger ones, gay and straight alike--are disappointingly generic.

Cameron (“One Way or Another”) seems to be a writer who works best against the grain of his own experience. It’s the characters most remote from him, in age, gender or oddity, who come most fully alive. Among these are a man who responds to unspecified marital problems by adopting an imaginary dog, a retarded youth just smart enough to know that nobody wants him, and an old woman afraid to ask her dead landlady’s relatives whether she’s about to be evicted. The final three stories focus on a small-town Indiana family from several points of view. Here Cameron’s people begin to act--a stern matriarch has an affair with a banker; her granddaughter runs off with a black man--having found a source of depth outside setting and plot: one another.