An Eye for Warts : WILDERNESS TIPS, <i> By Margaret Atwood (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese: $20; 247 pp.)</i>

When Margaret Atwood came to Los Angeles a few years ago to accept an award for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” she made a brief speech that tended to nonplus her well-turned-out audience. There may have been a ritual phrase of gratitude, but my recollection is that she pretty much started off by telling us about her taxi. It had caught fire on the way to the airport.

It wasn’t told as an amusing throwaway. It had a note of cosmic grievance, and it seemed in some obscure fashion to be the point of the speech. It was as if we were present while a story about Margaret Atwood was being turned into a story by her.

This is not just an evasive way to begin a review of her new collection, “Wilderness Tips.” The more I reflect upon it, the more I think of the flaming taxi. To the middle-aged women who are the center of most of the stories, the world is a taxi made by men and driven by a man. It catches fire just as the passenger--carefully dressed to proclaim no-nonsense without short-changing her sexuality--is on her way to collect a hard-won prize.

That is one thing. Another is that Atwood’s surreal wrath--her high-jump and, sometimes, her pitfall--is used in a particularly high-risk fashion. She devises a number of these stories on the edge of cliche. They are deliberate contraptions, stock cars that she sends out filled with explosives, and then detonates. The explosions are remarkable but the ride to them can be tinny.

In “Hairball,” Kat, the protagonist, is the trendy editor of a style magazine. She has the job because of her flair, but also because she captivates and eventually seduces her boss. The relationship is jagged. Kat, with her flash English background, cuts a little too close to the edge for Canadian tastes, and Gerald, the boss, has to rein her in. And Gerald, though smitten by Kat’s talent and sexiness, has a family he has no intention of leaving.

Familiar enough, so far; but then there are Atwood’s explosives. Having absorbed as much trendiness as he can use, Gerald takes over the editor’s job himself. Kat is operated on for an ovarian cyst; it is big, hairy and has five perfectly formed teeth. That this is a stridently obvious symbol of her sterile relationship with Gerald does not diminish the shock effect when she takes revenge by sending the hairball in a box of chocolate truffles to Gerald’s wife. We are blown away, but so is the story.

There is another annihilating ending in “Weight,” a more complex tale that develops out of a similar stock situation. The narrator, a lawyer who sleeps around--she is continually making omelets for other women’s husbands--is having a seductive lunch with one more richly pin-striped “200 pounds of hot beef.” His moves are comically awful; hers play his game, but with a different object: a check to build a women’s shelter.

It is in memory of Molly, who went to law school with her. They were an embattled minority; they shared dreams of fighting sexism in the profession, and practicing on behalf of women. The narrator sold out; Molly persisted until she was murdered by her unstable husband. The narrator’s fund-raising is both capitulation to, and defiance of, the male world. The bleakness of the ambiguity is underlined at the end when she imagines herself laying the money on Molly’s grave as if it were flowers.

In “Uncles,” a prominent journalist finds her success poisoned by the male’s mythic power. Her father died when she was little; growing up, she made a special effort to please her three uncles, who supported her and her mother. At the newspaper, she gets her chance by charming another uncle-like figure. After she becomes a television star, this mentor writes a savage memoir depicting her as an opportunistic climber.

It sends her back to a disabling memory: the photograph of her dead father that seemed to stare disapprovingly when, as a child, she showed off for her uncles. In Atwood’s acrid vision, though, the father is not a good man betrayed. He himself was simply one more man who abandons and betrays, in his case by dying.

Almost the only good men are not just dead but long dead. In “Bog Man,” an archeology student goes on a dig with her professor-lover. His photographs of his wife and children make her feel nonexistent; she draws comfort from the flattened, leathery remains of the centuries-old man that they are excavating. In another story, a similar empathy is felt by a woman watching a televised report about the digging up of an Arctic explorer, buried a century earlier in permafrost.

Long ago, perhaps, men and women were able to join fruitfully. Or perhaps the message is that the illusion of a beneficent male remains stubbornly encoded in women’s primordial needs. It is not that simple, though; Atwood is harsh and sometimes rattly, but she is not simplistic. The excavated Arctic sailor, it turns out, died from lead contamination in the food supplies. The pain that women receive from men is part of a larger contamination.

Atwood has a punishing, didactic side which, at her best, is deepened and broadened by two things. One is the evident justice of her anger, narrowly focused and partial as that justice may be. The other is the antic, even poetic wit which lifts her writing. Her sword has flowers etched on its haft; you can sense the plough share that was beaten into it.

In “True Trash,” set in a boy’s camp where the campers’ imaginations are inflamed by the young waitresses who work there, she writes of “the thrashing bushes,” full of gawking 14-year-olds, near the waitress’ swimming hole. There is a gentle understanding in her depiction of a camper who yearns for one of the waitresses. Danny “was supposed to feel lust for her, but this is not what he feels.” Danny will grow up to become another Atwood male, however.

In “Weight,” the narrator recalls Molly’s ill-fated optimism about men, despite her feminist convictions. She was “a toad kisser . . . She thought any toad could be turned into a prince if he was only kissed enough, by her.” As for the narrator: “I was different. I knew a toad was a toad and would remain so. The thing was to find the most congenial among the toads and to learn to appreciate their finer points. You had to develop an eye for warts.”

The alternation of Atwood’s brutal down-thrust and her lifting imagination works better, I think, in her novels. In these short stories, despite their strengths, the rhythm hammers so relentlessly, in such closely-reiterated strokes, that it can be hard to sense what else is going on.