BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : Winter in the Hearts of Her Women : A WILD, COLD STATE, <i> by Debra Monroe</i> , Simon & Schuster, $21, 272 pages

“She’s having a bad day,” explains a character about a friend in “Royal Blues,” one of eight masterful stories in the new collection by Debra Monroe. “Things are going poorly with Walter and you know how it is--slim pickings. If you break up with someone around here, it’s years before you get laid again.”

Most of the characters in “A Wild, Cold State”--the title, among other things, refers to rural Wisconsin, where all the stories are set--are having a bad day. Or year. Or life. Especially women. Isolated, overworked, married to the wrong man, the women who narrate all but one of these stories are, figuratively and sometimes literally, being left out in the cold by the men in their lives.

Monroe--who won the Flannery O’Connor award for her first collection of stories, “The Source of Trouble”--writes as if it’s winter year-round in Wisconsin: winter in the bleak and frigid landscape, and winter in the hearts of her women.

Following a trend in short fiction, the stories are linked not only by geography--in and around the small town of Bremmer--but by a cast of recurring characters, many of whom take a turn at the wheel as narrator. It’s a technique that underscores the truism that human reality is a matter of perspective: Characters who seem reasonable, even heroic in a story they get to tell, are depicted less charitably, with less understanding by their friends or family.

More impressive is Monroe’s ability to build a large world within the confines of one story--a world where the narrator’s deep past, the relationships of a lifetime and her hopes for the future continuously inform the present. Like Alice Munro’s stories of rural Canada, Monroe’s stories have a depth of field lacking in much contemporary short fiction, and focus not on small epiphanies but on major, usually immutable, life conditions.

For most of these women, it’s a blue-collar world from which they yearn to escape--through a man, through alcohol or through television. In “Have a Ball,” Ella Gustafson works as a cocktail waitress at Leinweider’s Lounge, where business thrives when it’s cold. “Cold temperatures. Lonely hearts. Good business,” as the owner says.

Women are angry in most of these stories. Too smart for the work they do, they’re in dead-end jobs in which the bosses and customers diminish them; they endure abusive sexual relationships. Like Zoe in “Plumb and Solid,” several of them are mothers with pig-headed husbands who have no empathy for women.

“Plumb and Solid,” the final and most riveting story in the collection, combines three of Monroe’s major themes--the isolation and entrapment of women, and the abyss between fantasy and reality--into a tense yet tender tale of one woman’s predicament. Already the mother of three young boys, Zoe is eight months pregnant, married to a potato farmer and in love with a gentle Bremmer mechanic named Davie, who is about to get married, and with whom she is having a longstanding affair.

As if that isn’t enough, a Hollywood film company is in town, shooting a surreal scene outside the five-story Big Muskie Museum, which happens to be shaped like a muskie fish.

A lesser writer would overlook this kind of ripe material. Consistent with the stories as a whole, Monroe stays with the moment-to-moment prosaic impressions of her narrator, flattening the charged moments--even frantic sex at Davie’s Texaco station--into understated realism:

“Pleasure began, colliding and rocking. . . . Davie leaned toward me. Angles, I thought. Forty-five degrees. Or 90. . . . I opened my eyes. The office seemed gloomy and subterranean. The cinder-block walls, the gray desk, the grease-smeared sofa. I heard a faraway gurgling noise.”

Zoe refuses to be marginalized. When a condescending member of the Hollywood crew tries to recruit her as an extra, as “part of the background” because she’d be “perfect, pregnant in that orange dress,” Zoe refuses indignantly. It’s bad enough to be an extra in real life.