FICTION

BLUES AND TROUBLE by Tom Piazza (St. Martin’s Press: $21.95; 192 pp.). The blues are a way of expressing pain and wearing it away through repetition; the simple lyrics and chords pound the soul into numbness, like shots of whiskey or the click of train wheels or the shuffle of one’s own wandering feet. In this debut collection of 12 stories, Tom Piazza plays variations on both the form and the traditional content of the blues. Some of the stories are short, almost plotless--pure music transposed into words. Others are full-length accounts of the kinds of trouble that make people feel blue: Love gone wrong, jobs gone sour, the edgy relationship between rebels and conformists who have both paid a price for their choices in life.

Piazza is a skilled writer (though badly served in this book by Stanley Crouch’s pretentious introduction). His style easily handles the musical riffs. In a few notes he can summon up a character’s voice or create a locale: a New Orleans cafe, a New York music company, a Gulf Coast fishing port awaiting a hurricane, an antique shop that sells Nazi memorabilia, a mansion in Memphis where a working-class suitor shocks his prospective in-laws, the road to Daytona Beach, Fla., where more than one man who has messed up a love affair with a woman tries to keep from messing up another. Since fiction isn’t music, the repetition palls after a while. It’s a relief when, in the next-to-last story, “Slowing Down,” Piazza pushes his familiar themes into new, exaggerated, comic territory without missing a beat.