BOOK REVIEW : Eisenberg Short Story Collection Looking for a Sense of Place : UNDER THE 82ND AIRBORNE<i> By Deborah Eisenberg</i> Farrar, Straus & Giroux $18.95; 253 pages

Six years ago, Deborah Eisenberg published her first collection of short stories, “Transactions in a Foreign Currency.” The best of them were finely bruised accounts of the insult that modern urban life inflicts on the sensibility of the educated and at least modestly privileged classes.

If that makes them sound mannered and rather familiar (considering quite a bit of American short-story writing over the past decades), well, in a way they were. But there was a fierceness in the insult and an energy in the sensibility. They pumped up the wind pressure on Eisenberg’s convoluted and unexpectedly voiced imagination so that it tooted like a bagpipe. In fact, it rather resembled a bagpipe.

That urgency, that insistent wind pressure, has died down in this new, rather disappointing collection. In some of the stories, the characteristic voicing remains, but it is underpowered, and the result is a sporadically successful ornamentation. In others--three of which are set outside the United States and away from Eisenberg’s familiar territory--the voice turns coarse and loud. Its energy seems borrowed; a shout when there is not enough conviction for a whisper.

In “The Cautionary Tale,” Eisenberg draws a sardonic picture of Patty, a young woman who arrives in New York, all fired up and full of hope and talent. What she finds is a New York that doesn’t need her. It has tens of thousands more like her. It will allow her to remain barely afloat as long as she paddles hard, and it will nibble at her fingers, meanwhile. A flaccid young man, a cold, eel-like creature, winds himself around her mid-section seeking warmth and does his languid best to drag her down.

To Patty, Eisenberg writes, New York “appeared to be quite overstocked with women, each more ornamental and accomplished than any 19th-Century young lady, huge quantities of whom, Patty noticed with growing terror, were waitresses.” For a while she can’t even find a waitress job; when she does, she is thankful to be allowed to hold a ladder that seems to consist of bottom rungs, a few top ones and nothing in between. Life, New York teaches her, “was something to be waged rather than relied on.”

This is wittily done; Patty, however, is an occasion for the author’s perception rather than a generator of her own. The background is good, the story is at best an old one brought up to date.

In “The Custodian,” perhaps the best one in the collection, another old theme is refurbished. Two small-town adolescent girls baby-sit for a charismatic professor whose life, with his painter wife and two children, seems to open up to them a rich world of art, good talk and spaciousness. He is a seducer; his wife, a former student, keeps house while he avails himself of her successors.

One of the two young girls, the narrator, is singed; her friend is incinerated. There is a suggestion of Alain-Fournier’s “The Wanderer” as the narrator suggests a golden world glimpsed and betrayed. But Eisenberg has her own authentic sharpness, and the narration is perfectly done.

“The Robbery” depicts a wealthy, selfish, promiscuous suburban set that tries but cannot succeed in shutting out the harsher outside world. It is well written, and psychologically and socially exact, but it seems artificial; perhaps because it so clearly suggests a John Cheever story.

In the stories with more distant or exotic settings, Eisenberg’s writing grows strident and its quality drops markedly. “Presents,” about a drugged-out movie star whose success is slipping and who is terrified--his drug-dealer’s girlfriend is the witness to his wreckage--seems both derivative and out of date. Its atmosphere of corruption has more decor than life to it. “In the Station” is a jumbled tale that draws an adolescent American girl into a dimly turbulent international set in London.

The title story and “Holy Week” are both variations on the same theme. In each, an American woman--one is an aging actress, the other a half-fledged post-adolescent--finds herself in Central America among the murderous plots and schemes of CIA agents, wealthy and suavely sinister locals and a festering, dirty violence.

We are back in Joan Didion’s “Democracy” or “Salvador,” Robert Stone’s “A Flag for Sunrise” or various other novels and films about well-scrubbed Americans doing deadly things on behalf of Latin America’s military oligarchs and U.S. money. The two women are innocents; one ends up raped, the other merely sickened.

The trouble with both these stories is not that they seem derivative and a little out of their time, but that they lack any sense of place or situation. The American agents disguised as salesmen or retired agricultural agents, the Latino oligarchs, the pack of voracious journalists are only third-hand caricatures.

There are a number of absurd or hyped-up scenes, notably one in which two senior American operatives sit at a hotel table explaining their secret manipulations to the actress just as the 82nd Airborne is about to land. I would think they had other things to do just then.

Next: Chris Goodrich reviews “Three Children” by Lori Toppel (Summit Books).