FICTION

NAKED TO THE WAIST, by Alice Elliott Dark (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 261 pp.) Alice Elliott Dark is a writer who knows her strengths and weaknesses. Her prose is plain, almost journalistic. Her repertoire doesn’t include those tricky sidesteps and magical ellipses with which John Cheever covered another stretch of the Eastern Seaboard. But she knows where she’s going--somewhere between New York and Florida, on the ragged edge where middle-class life frays into something messy and frightening. She also knows that it will take her a while to get there. These six stories are long without apologies.

What makes most of them work are the characters. As with people we know in real life, we aren’t sure what to think about them. Is the writing teacher who cheats on his wife and disappoints a student a well-meaning Everyman or a fatuous fool? Is the photographer who disciplines his girlfriend’s dog in her absence eager to please or manipulative? In Dark’s world, the man who beats his wife is also a doctor who arranges plastic surgery for her; the adventurous older sister who has escaped all of life’s ordinary traps is hopelessly in love with a man who’s gay.

In the title novella, Lucy Langworthy, a 30ish Philadelphian with a trust fund and a wild streak, takes up with a Vietnam veteran in the Florida Keys whose life seems as far as possible from “things like nine-to-five jobs.” Then she meets his friend, a mercenary who, she thinks, has achieved existential freedom by being “willing for people to hate him . . . willing to get hurt.” Seeking the same freedom, she leans so far over the edge that she can’t jump back without injury.

Another strength that Dark relies on to keep her stories from bogging down is description--not its razzle-dazzle but its authenticity. Whether a fertility clinic or a kennel, an art gallery or a bar, an airport or a beach, the context rings true. It’s not a political context, or even a social one, but it’s enough to give her characters time and space to make their moves.