FICTION

READ THIS AND TELL ME WHAT IT SAYS by A. Manette Ansay (University of Massachusetts Press: $19.95; 142 pp.). In these 15 stories, A. Manette Ansay returns to Holly’s Field, Wis., the scene of her first novel, “Vinegar Hill.” The characters she finds there are like geodes: plain on the outside but revealing, when split, unexpected colors. The splitting force is usually the broken family, which Ansay examines from a variety of perspectives. A young girl tallies her losses: the sixth finger on each of her hands, belief in her brother’s wolf stories and, finally, her father. Another man leaving his wife and children can’t help calling home from every truck stop on his escape route. A widow is bothered by the ghost of her husband, a stranger even after 51 years of marriage, who rustles the pages of his Popular Mechanics magazines in the bathroom of the house where she lives alone.

Ansay is a stylist and a skillful storyteller. Like Walter Kern, she has a sensitivity for the guilts and aspirations of the God-haunted. She also writes without condescension of semi-delinquent, economically marginal young people for whom shoplifting can be a form of self-assertion. At her best, she links her characters’ inner states with the world outside. A girl who goes into a ravine in back of her school and agrees to be molested by older kids in return for advice on birth control sees horses in the next pasture “yearning for human touch.” In the title story, a girl’s longshot ambitions for college are compared to the games of “chicken” she plays with friends in cars, racing trains to crossings: “Just after the moment I knew I wouldn’t make it” comes “the unexpected relief that I’d been wrong.”