FICTION

TEACHING ANGELS TO FLY by Salvatore La Puma (W.W. Norton: $19.95; 192 pp.) The “Angel Levine” in Bernard Malamud’s story of that name is a bony black man with flapping shoe soles; he visits the tenement of a Jewish tailor who, like Job, has suffered crushing loss. The angel who lands on a Brooklyn roof in Salvatore La Puma’s latest collection is a sloe-eyed girl who asks the young pharmacist who mends her torn wing with rubber cement: “Is this a come-on?”

The comparison doesn’t mean that La Puma (“The Boys of Bensonhurst”) lacks seriousness. But he’s a middle-aged man who came late to fiction writing, and his world-weary savvy is offset by the exuberance of a storyteller still taking off. He’s in love with talk--especially the dialect of New York’s Sicilian neighborhoods--and if the talk is sometimes glib, it’s never dull.

No Malamudian moralist, La Puma is interested in how love can touch people who seem to have gone beyond love, or fallen short of it. A bookie cheats his customers and risks death to impress his girlfriend. A Mafia don’s love for his wife puts him a notch above the government agents who ask him to assassinate a foreign leader. Sheer innocence enables a retarded couple to shrug off what would be tragedy for anyone else.

La Puma achieves a wide range of effects with a true short-story writer’s economy. An Army story set in Japan veers from the viewpoint of an idealistic young medic bucking the system to that of a hard-bitten sergeant who hanged war criminals after the Tokyo trials of the ‘40s. It packs in sex, sociology, history, a dozen characters; it seems to have the heft of a novella. It’s 14 pages long.