FICTION

THINGS NOT SEEN AND OTHER STORIES by Lynna Williams (Little, Brown: $18.95; 224 pp.) Lynna Williams writes Stealth stories. They zip into--and sometimes out of--our minds with an uncanny ease, and we wonder whether this is due to some blandness we failed to notice during the reading or simply to a technical polish so high that our radar, tuned to coarser frequences, neglected to produce a blip.

Actually, these nine stories are very fine. Williams’ style is a model of lucidity, economy and telling detail, though without any quality that cries out: This is Lynna Williams and nobody else. She creates a wide variety of characters--an adulterous Texas sportswriter, a young woman recently treated for depression, a couple coping with unemployment in Great Lakes mining country, the rebellious adopted daughter of a minister--and endows them with what seems to be an equally wide variety of emotions.

Each story sets your teeth on edge. The well-meaning protagonist has broken the rules, or put himself at risk of, at the very least, deep embarrassment. The sportswriter feels he must confess. The depressed woman grows overly attached to the family for which she baby-sits. The minister’s daughter visits the home of a man she believes to have been a Nazi. A woman whose 5-year-old daughter has died plans to confront her ex-husband, who has claimed publicly that his infant son by a second marriage is a reincarnation of the girl. “Love,” one character says, as if for all of them, “doesn’t make people safe, or keep them safe.”

As if for all of them. That may be the key to the Stealth effect. Williams’ characters differ, but their problems have a family resemblance; their emotions vary but vibrate at the same pitch. Taken all at once, these stories seem to lose their outlines and blend into one another. The solution is obvious: Read them one at a time, as they were written. And see if they don’t trigger a few alarms then.