FICTION

SHORT STORIES ARE NOT REAL LIFE, by David R. Slavitt (Louisiana State University Press: $18.95; 175 pp.) David R. Slavitt writes stories with points to them, if not exactly morals. This doesn’t mean that he’s a didactic writer--the kind whose prose sparkles because he’s grinding an ax in it. Rather, he’s writing in an oral tradition, one that goes back to rabbinical parables and folk tales in Eastern Europe, and when people tell a story, as opposed to composing it for the page, they almost always have a point.

The point of the title story isn’t exactly the title. For the writing teacher in New York City who narrates it, his students’ stories reflect all too faithfully the deviant sex, drug use, violence and decay that he sees all around him. In rejecting this, in asserting that life should be “mostly dull and mostly happy,” he short-circuits our expectations of his own story in order to create--another kind of fiction.

In many of the remaining 13 stories, the themes of this one recur. Art, storytelling, even lying can be a comfort in a world where comfort is at best fleeting and uncertain. A man whose hometown has been obliterated by development hears the past survive when his children repeat his father’s jokes. The brother of a writer bridges the gap between them when he discovers his own talent for being an impostor. The insult that crushes a failing businessman may be a relative’s sincere attempt to prevent his murder.

Slavitt writes of misunderstanding between Jewish fathers and sons, of bitter divorces, of a man momentarily reconciled to his family when he officiates at his grandson’s ritual circumcision. These stories are, by turns, suave, wry, witty and full of pain. In lesser hands, some of them would be mere essays, but Slavitt lets us hear, always, the speaking voice.