FICTION

JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR AND OTHER STORIES by Lawrence P. Spingarn (Perivale Press: $11.95 (paper); 103 pp.) Veteran Los Angeles poet and fiction writer Lawrence P. Spingarn makes an odd mixture of these 10 stories. They are subtle yet melodramatic, knowing yet somehow amateurish. Spingarn has little gift for dialogue; he writes in a musty idiom that compromises his descriptions of the present without bringing the past to life. Still, these stories have variety, and something about them that keeps us off balance.

A professor’s daughter has a love-hate relationship with the girls her father seduces. A young man confronts an uncle who collaborated with the Nazis. A Nevada woman takes out her resentment of her ne’er-do-well husband on his ailing father. An Egyptian pasha writes to a guilt-ridden English missionary in 1888. The statue of a mermaid changes the luck of a French customs inspector. The screams of tortured prisoners unhinge a writer in Greece.

The awkwardness of Spingarn’s stories--the writer’s-workshop plots (including a couple of suicides), the insistent prose--is in the foreground. The subtlety is hidden. In some cases, the plot is clear but the characters’ perverse nature comes as a surprise; in others, it’s the plot that must be traced, like an underground river, across a field of relationships that seem to have played themselves out.