BOOK REVIEW / SHORT STORIES : Vivid Glimpses of Bleak and Isolated Lives : THE QUEEN OF PUERTO RICO AND OTHER STORIES <i> by Joe Frank</i> ; William Morrow & Co. $18, 198 pages

Joe Frank, “a radio artist” on KCRW, is better known for performing his stories than for writing them, and indeed these eight tales share the kind of confiding, expository tone that might be enhanced by inflection, dramatic pacing and voice.

Oral literature with an urban setting, they recount facts in staccato bursts, intercut narrative with asides, or juxtapose italicized subplots whose connections or relevance are not always at first clear.

Frank tells about his characters rather than attempting to submerge himself into their points of view. There’s a distance, a cool, objective and observant eye at work, that, in the best parts of this collection, is most effective.

“Tell Me What to Do,” the opening story, concerns the adulterous relationship of two co-workers, as viewed from the male point of view. Subtly, inexorably, the affair--and with it, the man’s life--veers away from the control he initially assumes he exerts, and ultimately he finds himself alone, lost, without mooring.

“He took a deep breath and plunged into the street. Three blocks away, gasping, he stopped under the marquee of an X-rated movie house. His clothes were drenched. He watched the rain slanting in the wind. Traffic moved slowly along the avenue and he heard the distant siren of an ambulance. He thought: I do not want to go home and ducked into the theater.”

In “The Queen of Puerto Rico,” a young man on vacation with his family at a hotel in St. Thomas fantasizes about a mysterious woman with all pink accessories, a woman, he’s told, who’s “a washed-up hooker.” Incrementally over the next few years, without ever consciously making a clear choice, he allows circumstances to act upon him until ultimately he assumes a role parallel to hers at another hotel on another island, becoming a painted, created character who attracts the stares of a man seated at a nearby table.

Frank’s men and women tend to drift through their lives, surprised at where they find themselves. Rarely self-reflective, they deal on a surface level, navigating the turns of their fate without much reference to an eventual destination.

The narrator of “Fat Man” aborts one fairly promising career start after another until, almost by default, he’s turned into an obese fast-food junkie without the energy or motivation to change direction.

Kevin, the itinerant pool man in “Night,” experiences a long slide into dissolution and despair that seems to parallel his physical environment:

“You didn’t need to be a religious zealot to believe in impending disaster. The world seemed poised on the edge of an abyss. Tremors were recorded every week and a major earthquake had been predicted. When fires started they spread quickly, fueled by the Santa Ana winds. The fires burned off the brush on the hillsides, and when the rains came, the rocks and mud, without roots to hold the earth in place, collapsed in avalanches. A few months ago, on the Pacific Coast Highway, Kevin had sped through a torrent of falling stones and had watched in his rearview mirror as a mountain of rubble rose behind him.”

Finally, after a series of increasingly disastrous mistakes, “it occurred to him that he was slowly withdrawing, that the death he had wanted was in him, and he didn’t care.”

While Frank’s fiction is not uniformly successful--”The Decline of Spengler,” an exercise in surrealism, left this reader more confused than provoked--it is never uninteresting. He paints a human landscape that is bleak and isolated, but he does so with a vivid language that fairly shimmers with suppressed intensity.