FICTION

VANISHING POINTS by Thea Astley (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $19.95; 234 pp.). This is a wicked little time warp of a book, for those of us to whom development means either a step in a movie deal or a tract that’s going up 80 miles from downtown. What to do with the land is still very much an issue for Australia’s Thea Astley, who has written two clever novellas that share a point of departure. In “The Genteel Poverty Bus Company,” the heroic loner tries to get in the way of the businessman developer. In “Inventing the Weather,” the developer’s wife walks out on him and on her impossible children to find refuge at a mission that sits on what her husband comes to consider a very nice piece of the coast. Astley’s tone is a delightful balance--funny without resorting to punch lines, waggish without being snide. The wife’s adventure is particularly amusing; who can resist the notion that a woman who seems to have everything is smart enough to understand that all she owns are the trappings of a good life, and resourceful enough to find the exit. Her observations on why men so dislike women are delightfully wacky, and more convincing than any political diatribe.