THE BURNING HOUSE by Ann Beattie...

THE BURNING HOUSE by Ann Beattie (Vintage: $11; 256 pp.). This collection of Ann Beattie’s fiction might be subtitled “slouching toward maturity”: The Baby-Boom women in her stories reluctantly confront the end of their prolonged adolescence. (The men in her stories do little but vex the women.) The narrator of “Jacklighting” comments, “I always like people who have gone through radical changes. It’s snobbishness--it shows me other people are confused, too”; the divorced mother in “The Cinderella Waltz” muses: “I wonder for an instant if Milo and Bradley and I haven’t been playing house, too--pretending to be adults.”