Stylish miniatures

There are more comeuppances than epiphanies in “Fascination.” The stories in William Boyd’s collection are strung along a charm bracelet; looked at closely, most of the charms turn out to be tiny figurines with elegantly malevolent expressions.

Boyd has confected a set of period pieces. One story has a protagonist living in futile Chekhovian heartbreak on his decaying Russian estate; another slips in young Johannes Brahms playing piano in a Hamburg brothel. Another harks back to World War I; a fourth tells of a grievously injured World War II officer; a fifth, also taking place in the 1940s, is a bittersweet romance between well-to-do East Coast Americans. A sixth conjures an embittered 19th century Scottish ghost to undo a present-day architect. A seventh deals -- feather-light and ever so coolly -- with today’s performance art scene.

Beyond his period array of scenes and settings, Boyd offers a gently ironic commentary on the shifting styles of the short story over the decades. The entrapment of a wealthy visitor at a British country house suggests the slick deadfall machineries of Saki (H.H. Munro); the Scottish ghost has H.P. Lovecraft overtones. A bewildered son of selfish parents, who finds a kind of deliverance in the example of an old painter, suggests any number of plangent 1950s coming-of-age stories; the East Coast romance is John Cheever in concentrate.

It’s not imitation but pastiche. Boyd does it cleverly, usually entertainingly, and sometimes with great success. The stories mostly begin with invigorating bravado; some taper off with the glibness of an endgame whose end is apparent some ways before the ending.

Boyd is mainly a novelist: “A Good Man in Africa,” “Brazzaville Beach,” “The Blue Afternoon” and, two years ago, “Any Human Heart,” his searching, witty epic of 20th century British society. In these longer works, the author’s brainy fizziness is balanced by his novels’ heartfelt if witty human and social explorations. What the short stories in “Fascination” mainly explore, with several exceptions, is style; by the time the fizz settles they may be over.

In “Adult Video,” a no-longer-young Oxford student tells his story as if it were on video: start, pause, rewind, fast-forward. His supercilious tone inscribes an ascending flight, while what it relates is all leaky descent. His tutor rejects a paper for its cloud of careless errors. Lacking a scholarship, he teaches at a grubby local school. No golden Oxford walls for him: He lodges above a dentist. He sweats at a novel he’ll never finish while fast-forwarding into a fantasy of knighthood and Nobel, Booker and Pulitzer prizes. The story is lively if contrived, and better than it seems; a cheese puff with a distinctive aftertaste. Its poorer sequel, the title piece, carries the futile protagonist into two would-be affairs with a routine glimmer of wistfulness at the end.

Two stories are about faded stars. “Notebook No. 9” is a tired complaint by a once-successful film director, now ignored. “The View From Yves Hill” is more interesting for the crotchets and obsessions of its forgotten writer. The best touch is the ending, where Boyd allows him to partly redeem his misery by setting it down on paper. The shift from narrative to “narrative” is a light shift.

“Beulah Berlin, an A-Z” is an amusing portrait of a young American woman who makes a hit in Germany as a performance artist. She poses in a black bra and panties while gallery visitors drape her with gaudy garments. It is a wry image of the contemporary art scene, though not quite a takeoff. Boyd allows her to talk at length about her interests and disinterests. They are wan; in the current “whatever” mode (though the word isn’t used), likes and dislikes aren’t to be distinguished.

If the solecism can pass, Boyd is at heart a novelist of ideas, and they show in two of the better stories. “The Ghost of a Bird” tells of a soldier, a would-be writer, who is dying of a brain injury. His mental life has been replaced by the plot of a love story he’d written. The shift is fascinating; it is also, as related by a female doctor, pure sorrow.

Light irony takes on corrosive power in “The Mind / Body Problem,” an odd, lumpy story about Neil, who runs a gym in the absence of his two body-building, steroid-taking parents. Thanks to their addictions before his birth, he suffers from skin and other problems. When an attractive young woman joins the gym, he tries to woo her from her body-sculpting obsession, but in vain. He talks love, she talks steroids and beef plasma. He is writing a paper for a part-time philosophy course; his tutor compliments him for the cogency with which he argues that minds can exist independently of matter.

“Yes,” Neil says. “And matter can exist independently of minds. I see it every day, believe me.” Boyd uses the bitterness for his more universal quarrel with the self-adorning culture of the times. *