FICTION

THE LITERARY LOVER: Great Contemporary Stories of Passion and Romance edited by Larry Dark (Viking: $22.50; 343 pp.) The house of love is like an old Southern manse in a Faulkner novel--Greek pillars and formal parlors in front; rickety stairways, tumbledown slave cabins and jungle out back. The 19 stories in “The Literary Lover,” by and large, come up the carriage drive and in the front door. The authors--Joyce Carol Oates, Andre Dubus, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Edna O’Brien, Ward Just, Richard Bausch, Alice Walker, John Updike (in a disappointingly minor effort here)--are mostly mature, their narratives mostly realistic, their viewpoint mostly middle-class.

True, Charles Bukowski slips in the tradesmen’s entrance, but with one of his most conventional stories, “The Most Beautiful Girl in Town.” Grace Paley finds antic humor in the predicament of a welfare mother abandoned by her husband. William Kotzwinkle turns what seems to be an Asian sex yarn into a creation myth. But the wildest story in the collection is set in, of all places, Harvard: Harold Brodkey’s “Innocence,” a preposterous, crass, excruciating, lyrical, obsessive riff on boy-girl misunderstanding that features what has to be the longest buildup to an orgasm in American literature.

Still, there’s plenty of life in traditional forms, as the high quality of this collection proves. The very first story, Rachel Ingalls’ “Faces of Madness,” is worth the price of the book. It’s set in 1958, in a generic small-town world that, in the view of a teen-age boy who loves Romantic opera, “wasn’t an ideal stage on which to express emotion”--but which, before Ingalls is done, hits him with as much passion, deception, insanity and pain as anything in Verdi.