FICTION

HOMELY GIRL, A LIFE and Other Stories by Arthur Miller (Viking: $12.95; 115 pp.). These three stories, issued in honor of Arthur Miller’s 80th birthday, remind us that the distinguished playwright is a good writer, period. Miller uses old-fashioned realism to tell of a distant era when people took left-wing politics seriously, but his themes--the quest for identity and human dignity--are timeless. “Fame” (1966) is the slightest of the three--perhaps because Miller needed the least imagination to write it. A newly famous playwright half wishes he could be anonymous again but can’t resist dazzling an ex-classmate who hasn’t gotten the word. The title story (1992) follows a plain woman’s struggle to define herself outside society’s images of glamour and her first husband’s doctrinaire Stalinism. In the end, she concludes, “out of 61 years of life, she had had 14 good ones”--with a blind man. The best story is the last, “Fitter’s Night” (1966). With immensely convincing detail, Miller re-creates a New York shipyard during World War II, where shipfitter Tony Calabrese, who has played the angles all his life, risks death in brutal cold to repair a damaged destroyer, finding self-respect and an unexpected freedom when, for once, there is “no punishment if he said no, nor even a reward if he said yes.”