A Single Life Full of Love, Humor : WINGING IT: A Tale of Turning Thirty by Elizabeth Tippens; Riverhead Books; $10, paperback; 209 pages

The stories in this first collection by Elizabeth Tippens are like half-fledged birds. Awkwardness and a fleck of shell are still on them, but also more than a promise of flight; and the reassurance that in writing, as in nature, spring comes regularly around with old songs in a refreshment of new voices.

The nine jump-cut segments of “Winging It” present Faith: successively 27, 28, 29 and 30, single in the big city, and struggling to be an actress. She is variously involved with rich, sexy, middle-aged Lenny who will never marry her; poor, loving, poetical Sandy who desperately wants to; and cheerfully appreciative James, who will. Straying off here and there and never taking itself too seriously, it is a loosely organized montage of the love cycle. You long for what you can’t get, turn down what longs for you, and settle amiably for what you can settle for.

Nothing unfamiliar there; and no very wide range. In the ups and downs that Faith, Lenny, Sandy and James go through there is suffering but no cruelty, victims but no villains. People hurt people, but what really hurts is life. Life can be recovered from, though, with a modicum of love, courage, forbearance where possible, and humor.

The Faith-Lenny relationship, extending through four years and five stories is a comic duel in which the balances gradually shift. In “Perfume,” at the start, Lenny, a record promoter, has swept Faith off her feet and into a Cote d’Azur holiday, despite her compunctions about his married state.

The subsequent stages in the off-again, on-again relationship gain in depth and subtlety. Lenny becomes more vulnerable, and Faith stronger, with engaging backsliding on both sides. There is a particularly funny and shrewdly done scene in a frame shop, where an argument over modern art masks Faith’s efforts to get Lenny--now divorced--to commit himself. The argument gets so loud that they are thrown out. Here is a sample of Tippett’s zanily accurate dialogue, before it gets loud:

“ ‘What am I to you?’ she asks him.

“ ‘You’re you to me,’ he answers.

“ ‘I’m me to you?’

“ ‘Yes, you’re you to me.’

“ ‘What place do I occupy in your life?’ she asks.

“ ‘A place of high regard. I regard you very highly.’ ”

Faith’s fascination with Lenny’s vitality, sexiness and ability to teach and show her the good life contrasts with her relationship with Sandy, her live-in boyfriend. He has been in love with her since they were children in Virginia, and followed her to New York. For a while he is what she thinks she wants, and what Lenny isn’t: someone to attend her with utter faithfulness.

Eventually she finds him a drag and throws him out; meanwhile her obsession with Lenny cools. She takes up with James, a lawyer from Philadelphia, whose balance of practicality and spark begins to suit the adult she is becoming.

Blandness is a risk and sometimes a trap, but for the most part “Winging It” is lively and engaging. If the charm is not so much in the characters themselves as in the way Tippens writes about them, it is charm nonetheless.

Several of the stories work poorly. A piece about Sandy having a breakdown in New York is overambitious and unrealized; another about James on assignment in L.A. is wispy and out of place.

Two stories, though, go beyond charm and cleverness. A vignette of Faith living briefly and unhappily in Philadelphia with James gives a haunting sense of a New Yorker spooked by the mysteries and constrictions of a smaller city. The final story shows Sandy recovering and discovering his limits and possibilities back in the Virginia town he came from. It has some awkwardness and obviousness, but it is moving, and seems to foreshadow the author’s move beyond Faith’s alluring but not very substantial New York duels.