BOOK REVIEW / SHORT STORIES : Quirky Collection of Bleak Lives Feels Just Too Contrived : MOSES SUPPOSES <i> by Ellen Currie</i> ; Simon & Schuster; $20, 219 pages

The bubbles in “Moses Supposes” signal champagne, or someone drowning, or perhaps someone drowning in champagne. Whether it is a divorced couple nuzzling at their broken marriage after a child’s trouble brings them together, or a suffering teen-ager neglected by her rich parents, or a man helplessly trying to cope with his aged, destructive parents, the despair is voiced for rueful wit.

Ellen Currie, author of “Available Light,” wears her rue with a certain sameness. Most of the figures in these short stories are third- or fourth-generation Irish American, but a number have spent time in Salingerland. Drastic pain swims beneath the jauntiness. Extremities are costumed in kooky repartee.

There is a certain staginess even in the better pieces; they are not stories so much as narrative performances. Currie’s characters tap-dance on their griddle; too often it seems as if the griddle was there to produce the tap.

In “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” Baby is in the hospital, having given birth by Cesarean to a boy. Malachy, her husband, comes in to tell her he’d expected her to die so he could go off with Andy “and live happily ever after.”

Andy, she assumes, is his nickname for her best friend, Andrea; by the end, it turns out to be worse than that. But she retorts zingily: “So what’s Plan B?” And when he says he has no feelings for the baby, she explains it’s like a blind date: The feeling is supposed to grow.

Malachy is just the first of the doleful bubbles. Baby’s mother gets into a comically tearful exchange after an innocent remark about the baby’s looks. Andrea admits to going out with Malachy (“We lied. It’s the only efficient way”).

Her father arrives with her mentally unbalanced brother. Another brother, a priest who studied in Rome and was brilliant in theology, is now interested only in talking about his dogs. Four sisters arrive, each with troubles and repartee. Her mother-in-law complains about the Cesarean: “lazy muscles.” The talk is dark humor, but the multiple darknesses of the situation seem excessive and contrived.

So they do in the middle-aged plight of Griffith, depressed and flaccid, in “Yesterday’s Lilies, Dollar a Stem. An Epsilon.” His two aged parents live together and hate each other. His father used to beat his mother; now, being too feeble, he makes periodic threats to commit suicide. His mother compulsively scrubs the floor in an old party dress, buys day-old lilies to save money and preempts her husband with an abortive effort to hang herself in the park.

She ends up in the hospital, he ends up in jail for hitting a policeman, and Griffith ends up in a fit of giggles after breaking a branch in his own half-hearted effort to hang himself. Currie gets the blankness, the gallows humor, the bitterness of age and harsh memory. But she has placed them on a contrivance that strains for belief.

A situation so extreme as to seem self-conscious weakens though it doesn’t quite tear the lovely fabric of “Slim Young Woman in No Distress.” The conversation between Bravo, a preternaturally verbal child, and his mother, Glover, is quirky, comic and disturbing.

Bit by bit we learn that Glover’s divorced husband, a brilliant doctor whom the child worships, has lost his mind. His grandmother, with whom he lives part of the time, reads him from “A Child’s Book of Divorce.” She also reads from “A Child’s Book of Death.” Glover, an illustrator, is dying of cancer. Bravo--we imagine a Salinger child illustrated by Sendak--is in danger. Currie writes it beautifully but to excess, like a cook who uses every spice on the shelf.

Salingerian poignancy, without a corresponding ability to make the character alluring, overtakes two stories about what might be called poor little rich girls.

In one, an adolescent whose parents are too busy and selfish to have time for her, is laid up with the flu over a boarding school holiday. An old caretaker lifts her spirits with poetry and a reminiscence of her mother’s own young wildness.

In the title story, an 18-year-old, discovering she’s pregnant, goes into a winsome but not really interesting funk and is soothed by her comedic and infinitely indulgent young husband.

Two stories stand out in the collection. Both are about middle-aged marriages; both bend Currie’s charm and emotional effervescence to a graver service.

In “The Solution to Canned Peas,” a man visits his divorced wife to discuss some alarming symptoms shown by the youngest of their four daughters. An affair he had had still rankles, but in an evening of companionship, both the love and the pain of the past are wittily and movingly evoked.

In “Exit Interview” an aging and fading advertising executive balances his attraction to his fierce and funny young assistant, who loves him painfully, with loyalty to a wife who is dying of cancer. Currie transforms the choice to larger questions of loyalty--to life itself, to frailty and to the passing of time.

There is a certain staginess even in the better pieces; they are not stories so much as narrative performances.