FIRST FICTION

Calamity and Other Stories

Daphne Kalotay

Doubleday: 194 pp., $19.95

American literature has always had a soft spot for the plain style. True, the tug of war between minimalists and maximalists has been going on for more than a century, sometimes erupting into outright acrimony. (Witness Mark Twain’s famous potshot at the circumlocutory Henry James: “Once you’ve put one of his books down, you simply can’t pick it up again.”) For many American writers, less remains very much more. A case in point is Daphne Kalotay, whose “Calamity and Other Stories” avoids authorial grandstanding at every turn -- even at the cost of murmuring when she might better let out an occasional yelp.

Kalotay has been publishing her stories in literary quarterlies over the last decade. It’s not clear whether the pieces here are arranged in order of composition. Yet the initial entries are hobbled by their simplicity. The stubby sentences and parsimonious vocabulary sound like they’ve been tailored for teenagers. And Kalotay isn’t pulling a Holden Caulfield on us, indulging in mimicry. Instead, she seems to be hiding behind her prose, afraid to interfere with the fictional lives she has set in motion.

Luckily, matters improve as the linked stories pick up steam. In “The Man From Allston Electric,” a frustrated grad student chats up her latest candidate for Mr. Right: an unassuming technician sent to fix a blown outlet in her apartment. The two don’t quite connect. Yet Kalotay gives the situation a twist of stoic recognition: “Rhea watched the man’s lips move and noted that although he had a nicely dimpled jaw, his mouth was small in relation. She felt inexplicably saddened, watching this face with its various pleasant features.” At once we’re reminded that the relationship of one small thing to another is exactly what makes for inexplicable sadness -- and for superior fiction.

Forget the flashy epiphany, the Kodak moment. Kalotay prefers the glancing accumulation of detail, which pays off to impressive effect in the last story, “Wedding at Rockport.” Here several characters from the earlier tales collide, as if summoned to a class reunion, and the author nails both the festive, fizzy atmosphere and its melancholic undertow. The good news, then: If the first half of “Calamity and Other Stories” tries the reader’s patience, the second half unquestionably rewards it.

*

The Noodle Maker

Ma Jian

Translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 182 pp., $21

Ma JIAN, a Chinese dissident living in England, has little of Kalotay’s wallflower reticence. In 2001 he published “Red Dust,” an excoriating tour of his country during the early 1980s. It made China sound like the anteroom to hell and probably sent the Ministry of Tourism into conniptions.

Now Jian follows up with a novel, “The Noodle Maker.” Has the switch to fiction turned him into a kinder, gentler writer? Not in the least. If anything, the China depicted in these pages is more squalid, more subject to spiritual rot. And even the vaunted benefits of Westernization turn out to be a mixed bag, with such variegated highlights as “reading ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ watching a pornographic video, taking a mistress and buying a Western suit.”

Yet we keep reading in spite of the squalor, because at his best, Jian is a superb comedian. The characters -- including a novelist, a painter, a talking dog, a minor party functionary and the owner of a private crematorium -- spend their days jumping through bureaucratic hoops. Misery is a given. Relationships are an exercise in authoritarian mischief. “We behave kindly,” as one character notes, “even sycophantically towards people we are afraid of, but trample like tyrants over the shy and retiring.” Sex, too, is a form of conquest, when it doesn’t devolve into gang rape.

Not surprisingly, Jian’s reflexive bleakness can lose its charm after a while. And the book’s metafictional structure -- which allows one character, the novelist, to invent the others, manipulating their stories like noodle dough -- doesn’t help. Jian lacks the touch for this sort of thing. He’s not interested in the rippling effects of light and dark: His vision tends to be black on black. But when he plays to his strengths, this antic nihilist is hard to beat.