BOOK REVIEW : Prism Deflects Frail Figures’ Light : FATHER MUST<i> by Rick Rofihe</i> Farrar, Straus, Giroux $18.95; 166 pages

Rick Rofihe’s stories have bulging motor nerves and threadlike muscles. They are contour almost without mass; lines of fierce magnetic energy with only a dusting of iron filings to reveal their course. They are elusive, but not in the sense of escaping us. It is more as if we are unable to find them, and then they spring out at us; we are not sure from where.

His characters, frail and struggling to make connections, have a family resemblance to the numbly disjoined figures of the minimalist writers--Ann Beattie, the late Raymond Carver and so on. But a generation has gone by; those would be in their 40 and 50s by now; Rofihe’s, for the most part, are in their late 20s.

And they are different. The world is in every way less favorable, the ozone layer is thinner; these young people exhibit symptoms of ultraviolet overdose and a faint radioactive glow. Yet the numbness has burned off; more afflicted, they are also nervier and more determined to be heard. Their speech rhythms, with slight, odd deformations, are lyrically expressive for that very reason, as a stammer may intensify a thought. Sometimes, even, they are cheerful.

They want connections even if they are not always able to make them; but the wanting is itself a claim on life. If it is deflected, it is in the way a prism deflects light; colors are cast.

“Boys Who Do the Bop” is one such prism. Nooney, a young man hesitantly starting out, half-lives with Enid, who is in her 30s, has been out and back and is still drifting. Half-lives: He sleeps on her couch most nights, although he has a place of his own. Ostensibly, they are just friends, yet when Nooney tells Enid about a girl he’s met, she does the ironing without a bra and with her blouse part-open. He misses the suggestion; he gives her a good-night kiss. “But it was the kind of kiss you can’t expect to go far, a kiss without plans.”

Enid puts on her makeup for hours and sings old traveling pop songs through the open door of her bedroom. Not a move is made, yet there is a powerful current of longing. It is erotic and melancholy; he is too unformed to take what he wants, and she is too buffeted to make more than an ambiguous offer. His desire and her receptiveness are like holograms, vivid and unreachable. Later, they will send occasional jokey post cards to each other; he writes several real letters that he doesn’t mail.

There is an even richer prismatic effect in one of the most complex of the stories, “Elevator Friends.” A successful painter is attracted, even obsessed, by two downstairs neighbors: Bim, another painter, and Lily, his lover and model. Bim is struggling and has to do odd jobs; yet there is a mysterious richness in his relationship to his art and his lover; his paintings of Lily give off a special light.

Rofihe tells the story in a series of innocent and matter-of-fact encounters. There is an apparently casual friendship between the two artists, edged only by the narrator’s seemingly offhand questioning and by Bim’s and Lily’s quiet evasiveness. Yet in a few pages, we see the narrator’s uncertainty about his own life, his longing for the imagined reality of somebody else’s.

“Reading Chinese” expresses such a longing even more clearly. It is a brief, wryly comic monologue to a silent bedmate by a young man who has chosen to live in Chinatown. The activity in the streets seems to possess a sense of purpose he lacks, particularly as it’s conducted in a rapid, percussive language he doesn’t understand. “What’s great about living in Chinatown is so many people getting up in the morning knowing what they want that I start wanting what they want.”

Foreignness seems to exert a superior hold on life. Two of the brightest and perkiest stories are, in fact, told by Latino immigrants trying to figure out New York. Both are lonely and disoriented, yet both find the energy and self-assurance to prevail in small and exhilarating ways.

Rofihe can write a sentence that is entirely correct yet manages to suggest the native Spanish-speaker. With his more fragile native English-speakers, he can slightly unbalance their phrases so as to convey ardent desire and uncertain strength. In one story, he not only writes in the voice of a 7-year-old, but also manages to show the child’s dreamy transition between one moment of growing up and the next.

A few of the stories are simply exercises in tone; one or two seem excessively contrived. These are exceptions. The voices of Rofihe’s people are so individual that they have not defined or inscribed themselves into any more general idea or category. They are entirely unaffiliated; accordingly, they can be hard to make out, but we have no doubt about their breath and heartbeat. The author walks an edge between elusiveness and suggestion. The edge, like that of a Chinese drawing, is rendered in brush strokes that are sharply controlled and expand like clouds.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “The Season, It Was Winter: Scenes From the Lilfe of an American Jew, Vol. 5” by John Sanford (Black Sparrow Press).