FICTION

THE AGE OF MIRACLES: Stories by Ellen Gilchrist (Little, Brown: $22.95; 272 pp.) Many of the characters in these stories speak so quickly and candidly, seem so robust and healthy that they look back over their shoulders at the panting, slightly down-at-the-heels, mired-in-doubt reader now and again and call out “Get the picture?” Rhoda Manning, magazine writer, appears in several of the stories. She lives on Xanax and Evian and Donna Karan. Marriage, sex, divorce, solitude and company are all strangely equal in her life. “You figure it out,” she says in “A Statue of Aphrodite.” “Women and their desire to pleasure wealthy, self-made men. Think about it sometime if you get stuck in traffic in the rain.” “I was not in love with anyone,” she muses in another story, called “Paris,” “and I did not want to be. ‘BOND NO MORE’ it said on notes I had scattered around my house. . . . I was free to let the whole world be my lover.” Equanimity and humor, that’s what the characters in these stories have in common. The circumstances they find themselves in are stranger than truth and perfect for fiction, perhaps the most memorable is “Madison at 69th, a Fable,” the tale of three children who kidnap their mother and slip her a mickey to prevent her from getting a face-lift. “Think of how tired she must have been,” says one daughter, waiting for her mother to wake up, “She’s just worn out with watching us grow up.” “I love her,” says another, “but she’s still a bitch.”