BOOK REVIEW: STORIES : A Quartet of Noteworthy Tales About Some Ordinary People : THE PALACE THIEF, <i> by Ethan Canin</i> , Random House; $21, 205 pages

This collection of four long stories, or short novellas, brings to mind D.H. Lawrence’s division of American writers into the genteel and the wild.

Ethan Canin (“Emperor of the Air,” “Blue River”) is genteel. The pleasures of reading him--and they are considerable--are the pleasures of restraint, not of excess. Canin writes quietly, if tellingly, about ordinary people. He relies on the well-chosen detail and the revealing line of dialogue to achieve effects for which lesser writers have to pull out a gun.

At 33, Canin, who is completing his medical residency, is not only intelligent but precociously mature. He tells these stories through the minds of people older than he is, intuiting experiences he couldn’t have had, and it works.

His prose is clear and graceful and--whether in the first or the third person--beautifully modulated to fit the main character’s personality.

In each story, the main character too is genteel. Sober, ethical, inhibited, at least conventional, he must come to grips--this is the recurring issue--with somebody close to him who is wilder, stranger or more ruthless than he.

In “Accountant,” the narrator is totting up the ledger of his life. On the credit side is a career of steady, if unspectacular, achievement; on the debit side is the far greater success of a childhood friend who seemed to rely on luck instead of hard work.

The two meet again at a fantasy baseball camp run by the San Francisco Giants. The narrator, inspired by the presence of Willie Mays and his own feats on the diamond, seems about to balance the books--until he commits an act that not only sabotages his career but puts his whole well-ordered life in doubt.

“I have always felt the impulse for uproar and disorder,” he realizes--his choice of a spendthrift wife is a clue--and he wonders if this flaw in his character may be “so large that it cannot properly be called a flaw but my character itself.”

Character is fate: Canin quotes Heraclitus to that effect, then plays elegant variations on the theme.

In “Batorsag and Szerelem,” the younger brother of a troubled math prodigy in Ohio asks what his father would say if he too went astray. The father says he isn’t the type. The boy asks, “What if I changed my character?” and the father answers, “You won’t. That’s the point.”

At the same time, though, the parents’ fate is to always be a step behind. Rattled by the upheavals of the early ‘70s, they abandon Judaism, become Quakers, protest the Vietnam War and try to understand when their older son smokes pot and has a girlfriend living in the basement--but they fail to recognize the “foreign language” he seems to have invented, or the deeper secret that language hides.

In “The City of Broken Hearts,” a Bostonian whose wife has left him for one of his colleagues seeks solace in Red Sox games and in visits from his son, a serious young man who works at a shelter for battered women. The father has been looking for romance in bars; the son introduces him to a more appropriate companion.

He considers marrying her but can’t be sure that his fate--a singular one in this time and culture--isn’t to love one woman only: his ex-wife.

In the title story, Canin echoes the moral concerns of Louis Auchincloss’ 1964 novel, “The Rector of Justin.” A history teacher at a Washington, D.C., prep school looks back on his failure to civilize the obstreperous son of a Southern demagogue.

It isn’t just that the boy has been corrupted by his inheritance of power seeking; the school too has been corrupted by its hunger for money and status, and the teacher by his self-deluding idealism.

Throughout, Canin has a sure touch with family relationships, and there is a bright and generous spirit--call it a youthfulness--to his telling of these stories that compensates for their formal polish and the rigor of their conclusions.

One is reminded of Philip Roth, who showed a similar verve and the same uncanny maturity in his first two books, then got bored with being grown-up and embarked on a literary adolescence from which he hasn’t returned.

Will Canin do the same? Never mind. This is hardly the time to worry about him; it’s the time to enjoy.