FICTION

NOUVELLE SOUL, by Barbara Summers (Amistad Press: $22.95; 256 pp.) A cookbook? No, though Barbara Summers starts by listing the ingredients in these 24 short stories: “No slaves here. . . . No clay-footed manifestoes on race and gender. . . . Just stories of folks who live close by.” In other words, African-Americans who, while attention was focused on the ghetto, have been leading middle-class lives, their joys and problems largely overlapping everyone else’s.

Summers, a former model, uses her fashion background in a couple of stories, and her knowledge of Paris in several. The best stories, however, are those in which she stretches, creating characters quite different from herself and even adopting multiple points of view. A pioneer aviator, killed in a crash, is remembered by her mother, friend and lover. Three sisters cleaning their mother’s house find evidence of their late father’s infidelity. A middle-aged woman on vacation with her husband finds in another couple’s happiness the roots of her own discontent. A race driver called Tony the Tiger recalls his checkered career.

The order in which Summers wrote these stories isn’t given. They clearly are apprentice work. The prose varies from the inane gush of newspaper lifestyle sections to a tough and flexible command of idiom; the plots struggle to escape reliance on devices such as stuck elevators and incriminating letters, and only sometimes succeed. But she has a good feel for families--how they can fracture even as they cohere--and a way of suggesting that even for these relatively fortunate people, the shadows of discrimination linger, even in the well-scrubbed corners of suburban homes.