Fairy Tales for Grown-ups : THE MATISSE STORIES, By A. S. Byatt <i> (Random House: $17; 144 pp.)</i>

The lasting impression the reader has of A. S. Byatt’s three stories in this collection is of an extravagance of color, a riot of color, venous-blue and fuchsia-red and crimson and orange henna and copper. Here are some of the objects in an artists’s studio: “A Korean kite in puce and yellow and blue and green and scarlet, and there are two large Chinese silk pipe-cleaner birds . . . one predominantly crimson, with a yellow and aquamarine crest, one blue and green.” Here are a woman’s clothes: “She wears suits in soft dark, not-quite-casual colours--damsons, soots, black tulips, dark mosses--with clean-cut cotton shirts . . . also in clear colours, palest lemon, deepest cream, periwinkle, faded flame.” Colors are so insisted upon it is as though color were what the stories are about--and so, in a sense, they are.

And yet the stories raise issues which, in themselves, one might have thought reason enough for Antonia Byatt to write them--issues of an aging woman’s place in the world, of cultural identity, of art itself. In the first story, “Medusa’s Ankles,” a middle-aged and dispossessed woman, driven to face the fact of her dispossession in a hairdresser’s salon, smashes the place up. In the longest story of the collection, “Art Work,” a middle-class white English artist finds that, whereas he fails to get an exhibition in a London gallery, the daily cleaning lady--part Guyanese, part Irish, “neither black nor brown but a kind of amber yellow”--has an enormously successful exhibition in the same gallery of her own work, an installation of wildly colored hangings and sewn, knitted and knotted figures made out of old curtains, old dresses, old ties. The third and perhaps best story, “The Chinese Lobster,” consists of a conversation in a Chinese restaurant between the female dean of women students at an unnamed London university and a distinguished visiting professor, an art teacher, about an allegation from a young female student that the male art teacher has sexually harassed her. What makes this story particularly interesting is the very issues it raises about art seen for its essential formal aspects, as the nearly retired art teacher tends to see it, and art--in this case, Matisse’s paintings of female nudes--seen from the point of view of a young feminist art student who hates Matisse’s nudes and whose own work consists of “revising” the hated paintings.

Why Byatt so insists on emphasizing color in her descriptions is clearly stated in the title of the collection. “The Matisse Stories” make up a book that is in itself a literary inversion illustrating the art of Matisse, an artist known above all for his use of color. Byatt’s fiction, predominantly the novel for which she won the Booker Prize in England, “Possession,” is essentially informed by an intelligent, even a scholarly mind, pitched more to interpretation rather than fact in itself, to “ideas” rather than “things.” But it is as though in “The Matisse Stories” Byatt were trying to break out onto another level, that of making art, as William Carlos Williams so exactingly advised, “not in ideas, but in things”--”things” in this book being for Byatt colors at their most self-sufficiently and vibrantly intense.

At times, it is as if the writing throws a fit, in the way the desperate woman at the hairdresser’s throws a fit by hurling jars, tearing driers from their sockets, breaking basins with hairbrushes, to become something more than an idea, to become all dazzling color--to become as immediate, as saturated, as absolutely satisfied and as satisfying as the colors in a painting by Matisse. The very drama of the stories is that of people--or, at least, English, middle-class people--locked into ideas and desperate for the something more than ideas that can liken art to a comfortable armchair in which they might rest their distraught minds, as Matisse himself said he wanted his paintings to be like for his viewers; and the sadness of these funny stories is that the characters, as much as they long for the something more , are too self-conscious, middle-class English intellectuals condemned to thinking about the meaning of art, or life, ever to be able to rest in the comforting colors of art, or life.

Antonia Byatt, a serious writer of great integrity, is finally recognized as preeminent among contemporary British writers. Being as culturally aware as she is, in “The Matisse Stories” she has to be making a point about the culture in which she lives. It is interesting to speculate why her prose style, like that of Martin Amis and Will Self and Jeanette Winterson--to mention a few of the most visible of British writers today--exerts itself so to be high-spirited and colorful, at a time when England is in a low, gray state of disaffected ideas from which it seems not to be able to rise.