FICTION

THREE EVENINGS: Stories by James Lasdun (Farrar Straus Giroux: $18; 145 pp.). There’s one sentence in James Lasdun’s second collection of stories, after “Delirium Eclipse,” that perfectly embodies the author’s style and sensibility. In “The Coat,” the son of the main character, Muriel, is described as follows: “An only child, born late in a marriage already entrammelled in mutual if seldom articulated grievances, Billy had seemed from an early age pale and indefinite, as if stretched thin by the diverging motions of his parents.” The language is elaborate, well-cadenced, clearly British, and the subject matter fairly typical for Lasdun--the uncertainty that sensitive people face while making their way in the world, and the often unacknowledged resentments that build up as a result. “The Coat” is perhaps the best story in the collection, describing Muriel’s emotional attachment to a yellow coat that was given her by “a dear friend,” and from whom she expects, the coat teaches her, too much. The story is exceptional because Lasdun captures so well Muriel’s complex, pre-rational relationship with the coat--her admiration, anxiety and possessiveness, her willingness to spend an entire day looking for the coat’s lost button. Equally good, if slightly too clever, is “Ate/Menos, or The Miracle,” in which a young man is drawn, almost by fate, into an afternoon’s impersonation of a theatrical director. Each of the story’s characters marks the line between reality and fantasy in a different place, which leads not only to confusion but also, on the narrator’s part, to deeper questions of identity. “Three Evenings” is a slim collection, but these two stories make it memorable.