BOOK REVIEW: SHORT STORIES : Extraordinary Tales From Ordinary Lives : HONEY: <i> Stories by Elizabeth Tallent</i> , Alfred A. Knopf, $22, 207 pages

The broken marriages and relationships that figure in Elizabeth Tallent’s stories are like smashed mirrors. A picture disintegrates. The man and woman--and the children and stepchildren who are part of the broken picture--bleed as they walk barefoot through the shards, but they also catch bright glimpses of themselves and of each other. The shards are mirrors too.

Tallent, author of “Time With Children” and “Museum Pieces,” is one of our most penetrating and perceptive specialists in the domestic emotions. She writes of a subject so much treated as almost to become a genre--the pain that there is in middle-class marriage--with an elegance and intensity of insight that extend it. She wrests from a familiar instrument a note or two that are improbably above its range.

She writes of the ties of family in a time and society where the ties break and transfer; and of the strands that vibrate across the breaks. She writes of the tensions between new loyalties and old ones, the pentimento that comes through the paint job.

She writes of how children get shuffled and shifted; how they parch in a small desert of emotional neglect, while a parent is doing his or her new thing, only to be flooded out in sudden, reparative and misguided attention.

Her men are thick, blind and aggressive even in their benevolence; they can also be comforters and capable of learning. They learn from women, who can be irritating and misguided, but who on the whole know more, often in invisible and unspoken ways. Fortunately--and this is part of Tallent’s elegance--they don’t know they know.

“Prowlers,” the first story in the collection, is almost a compendium of these elements. Denny, an architect, is by almost any lights a reasonable man. In remodeling his New Mexico house he has respected the original Spanish use of thick walls, small windows and shade. Easterner newcomers, Tallent writes, put in picture windows to capture the light, which they treat as a collectible, like bleached bison skulls. So we know Denny is good. And, knowing Tallent, we know that he has a lot to learn.

He lives happily with Francesca, his second wife, and more nervously with Andy, the son of his first marriage. Chrissie, his first wife, was a flake who took up things--a novel, a diet, Zen, her marriage, her son--only to abandon them. Divorce was awful; Denny remembers it as a long dark tunnel he managed to push through, pushing Andy in front of him. For some reason Andy is not entirely grateful. He continues to write to Chrissie, even though she has stayed in Paris with her lover during the summers Andy was supposed to be with her.

Chrissie turns up, takes an apartment, wants Andy for the summer. Absolutely not, says Denny, certain he is in the right. That night Francesca holds back the sleep she has a wonderful talent for, long enough to ask a few skeptical questions.

She is neither explicit nor insistent; she is an oracle who pronounces a riddle and falls silent or, in her case, back to sleep. It is enough, though; Denny sneaks into Chrissie’s apartment, mooches around, looks in her icebox. Then, to his own surprise--and Andy’s and Chrissie’s--he drives his son over for the weekend.

It is Tallent’s originality to make the apartment incursion a violation that turns into something else. Denny learns something: that Chrissie is as real as he is. The learning is different in “Kid Gentle.”

The estrangement produced in a young marriage by a disastrous miscarriage is healed, paradoxically, by two flights. Sam, on the pretext of a job, stays away for days at a time. Jenny buys a horse--they had vaguely agreed she wouldn’t--after a charmingly erratic search. Briefly she falls in love with the horse, its owner, the owner’s baby; she comes back with the horse only, and Sam comes back to acknowledge his feelings of pain and helplessness about the miscarriage.

Three of the stories treat, with a mixture of hope and sadness, the painful triangle of Hart, Caro, his second wife, and Kevin, his son by his first wife who now--because of an alcoholic childishness Hart never quite overcomes--represents the Other Woman.

The tenderness, and the frequent redeeming note that comes at the end, are a gamble until you realize that they are not arbitrary; that she has made a kind of miracle of the redemption and that, like all real miracles, it consists of a logic that only Tallent can make us see.