Fantastic Tales of One Family’s Life : THE IMPOSTER: Stories About Netta and Stanley, <i> by Paula Sharp,</i> HarperCollins, $20.00, 216 pages

These terrific stories can be compared to the work of Barton Sutter or Carol Bly or Blaise Clark or Richard Ford, but all these comparisons leave out a crucial component. That strange component cannot be paraphrased--though the introduction here makes a brave, two-page stab at it. Are these “Stories About Netta and Stanley” a serious study of how juvenile delinquents turn into criminals? About how every small town in America has a strange, unexamined underbelly? About how the disintegration of the family has led in turn to the disintegration of larger American life?

I don’t think so. These wonderful stories are about all of us, and they question whether American family life, ever, at any time, had a chance in hell. They remind us that without a little crime we’d all die of boredom; that the best experiences we have are almost always forbidden, and that all of us are just one or two baby steps from losing it altogether--leaving our spouses, driving the wrong way on the six-lane highway, dropping acid, committing adultery, torturing our children in one amateurish way or another; either from sadism, well-meaning stupidity, disorganization or too much love.

The first story here sets up a “crime” in 1978, in which a zombied-out attorney is picked up by his limo late at night. The driver, Stanley, and his “girlfriend” (actually his second cousin, Netta) pick up an attractive woman off the street, then get caught in a demented auto accident involving a very attractive, galloping runaway horse. They give the poor attorney a heart attack, which doesn’t take his life away, but instead gives it back to him. Waking up, he sees life in all its mad splendor. Nevertheless, Netta and Stanley are taken down and booked for limo-stealing, kidnaping and a long list of assorted irregularities of conduct.

Eight more stories fill in some of Netta and Stanley’s background. They’ve lived all over America but generally speaking divide their time between Jersey City and a freezing little Devil’s Island of a town called Ripon, Wis. Netta’s father, a terrific guy and a college professor in Ripon, runs off with a drugged dropout half his age. Stanley’s father, a nasty man named Ross Wilks, runs off but is obsessed with getting Stanley back, staging several kidnap attempts over the years. The mothers of Netta and Stanley do what they can with a string of ever more baroque and bizarre boyfriends who trail owlishly through their respective lives, but the moms rely more on their own mothers, who are world-class ding-a-lings; women who have discovered that the absence of a “real home” can be freedom, whatever that means.

Cars, vans and giant pink Cadillacs play mythic roles in this family, which holds together remarkably well, considering how radically it’s falling apart. Aging drunken boyfriends keel over and die in the snow; irate wives burn down barns with live pigs still squealing in them, kids drift off at the zoo with the wrong families but somehow get returned to their rightful parents. Stanley, who is “functionally illiterate” is a sensitive intellectual with a strong inner life. Netta, who finds more than her share of passionate love, grows up plucky and strong and absolutely able to make her own way in life.

Generally speaking, writers get it all wrong when they write about the poor and the terminally out of it. In their good intentions, writers exhibit a mind-set something like the Boston Pops: If you don’t have some kind of “culture,” no matter how watered down, you’re to be pitied, or saved. Then some poor person has to write an introduction about “the transitory nature of the modern American family and the effects of rootlessness on Americans. . . . “ Meanwhile, people are making love in cemeteries, and foiling kidnap plots, and thinking and defying and stealing and shooting guns and managing in their adventurousness to be far more American than any intellectual could ever be. For three stories in this fantastic collection, Paula Sharp deserves to be assumptioned into Pink Cadillac Heaven.

Next: Constance Casey reviews “Memoirs” by Kingsley Amis (Summit Books).