In the absurdist corners of contemporary life

If instead of tracing back to an oxygen-producing single cell our evolution had started anaerobically -- with the botulism bacteria, say -- the results could resemble many of the characters in Judy Budnitz’s baleful short-story collection.

Among them: a circle of high-minded women who try to drown a rival; a family in a bleached post-nuclear world that pens up traveling salesmen until they can be destroyed; a surgeon so obsessed with the limbs he amputates that he plants them in a field to grow and wave like wind-furrowed corn.

They are grotesques, and they match the circumstances in which they live. Budnitz is not after mere horror, although the weaker pieces are not much more than that. She is attempting to take the implications of our contemporary life, already suffering from distortion, and draw them to a wildly logical extreme.

In this, her work descends from the absurdist tangles and back-to-front displacements of the late Donald Barthelme.

His stories devised far-fetched dreams from our overconsumption of a contaminated reality. Many were sinister, but a kind of pleasure ran through them, and beyond the pleasure, a kind of tenderness. The extravagances held a faintly recognizable humanity. Although in Barthelme’s wonderlands, his Alices -- unlike Lewis Carroll’s -- never really knew they were Alices, the reader still could believe they might be.

Except for one or two of the better stories, Budnitz is much colder. She lets her characters be pitiful at times, but a ring of ice surrounds them; we contemplate without an invitation to enter. The far-fetched dreams are nightmares, often ugly ones.

In the first piece, “Where We Come From,” a Mexican woman is obsessed with having a “nice big American baby.” Impregnated by a cousin, she tries to cross the border by truck, by boat, in a car, on foot and is invariably caught and returned. This goes on for years, until a border guard finally relents and takes her to a hospital.

Newborn, the boy is already 4 years old. He is indeed nice, big and American, and as such he’s taken for adoption by an American couple; his mother is sent back. He later vanishes, stolen by the mother or -- Budnitz’s stories tend to be visited by low-spirited versions of the uncanny -- merely by the power of her longing.

There is a political point: America’s double repression and exploitation of illegal immigrants. The plight of the mother is pitiable; but the grotesquerie of the four-year pregnancy, even if it magnifies a savage irony, is developed with such fleshly insistence that the effort to open a reader’s receptivity is apt to steamroll it shut.

In “Visitors,” a self-centered young woman works on her issues with her boyfriend. Meanwhile, cellphone calls from her decrepit parents, driving in for a visit, announce a series of ever more dreadful and finally unearthly disasters. In “Immersion,” a girl indignant that black kids have taken over the town pool arranges for a young houseguest, in the initial stages of polio, to go swimming and infect them.

The satiric point, though sharp and even ingenious, is overborne in such stories: They lack the pleasure of their kinks. In others, pleasure struggles, but it does emerge. “Preparedness” has a president obsessed with the threat of nuclear attack. He paralyzes urban life by turning the subways into air-raid shelters and bombards the public with alarming instructions.

Yet when he orders a series of alerts, nobody takes shelter. It’s not that people assume them to be drills; on the contrary, they assume the world is ending. Exuberantly, joyfully, they rush to do the things they’ve yearned for: leave their mates, insult their bosses, make love with strangers. To cling to life is to lose it; to defy it is to gain it. This is no small allusion to our reigning preoccupation with national security.

In “Flush,” the absurd recalls Barthelmean tenderness. A mother refuses to have a mammogram; a daughter insists on taking her. The mother slips away just before her name is called; embarrassed, the daughter gets it instead. The results are negative, the mother is happy: It’s her daughter she cares about.

Months later, another daughter takes the mother on the same errand and the same thing happens. This time, the result is positive and there is grief. But as with the earlier joy, it is impossible to say just where it lodges. Mother and two daughters: Where does each one end, and where begin?

Scream a little softer, the saying goes. “Flush” screams very quietly indeed. Attending the scalloped whorls of the listener’s ear, it makes itself heard with clarity and grace. *