FICTION

SHARES AND OTHER FICTIONS by Richard Stern (Delphinium Books: $20; 202 pp.). For me, Richard Stern’s latest collection of short and medium-length fiction consists of wrapping paper and a bomb. The wrapping is work he has done in the last couple of years, including the title novel, a Desert Storm tale and a very fine story called “The Illegibility of This World,” in which a man who, his son notes, “retired early, you’ve had a good marriage, you’ve got a granddaughter . . . you haven’t been sick; you still play tennis, you liked your job, you’ve got some dough,” finds that in the face of death even all this isn’t enough.

The bomb is a novella, “Veni, Vidi . . . Wendt,” which first appeared two decades ago in “1968: A Short Novel, an Urban Idyll, Five Stories and Two Trade Notes.” This happens to be the first book I ever reviewed for a newspaper. I recall that my cub-reporter self, impatient with any writing less ambitious than Tolstoy’s, considered Stern’s prose overly mannered and the story--about a Chicago composer doodling on an opera in the sexually heated atmosphere of Santa Barbara--inexplicably shadowed by Midwestern rue.

Talk about deja vu . But the novella holds up well. Stern’s reluctance to dance naked in the high noon of the counterculture seems like prescience now that the breeze off the West Coast has the penitential nip of evening. The clash of the generations--a recurring theme of Stern’s--seems sharper and funnier now that I’m old enough to be a parent. Even the winking, capering prose now seems less an affectation than a necessary disguise: Stern, a nice guy and therefore vulnerable, jokes and sings frantically to disarm us. Elmore Leonard has said he throws away any page he writes that seems “written,” composed, artificial; Stern proves that the opposite method also works.