DISCOVERIES

READING is boring, thinks Sage, one of the four young Vietnamese women whose lives are interlocked in Dao Strom’s collection of stories, “The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys.” Literature, Sage decides, falls “short of the immediacy, the immediate impact, of other art forms like, say, music.”

Immediacy, impact. Reading Strom’s stories, one understands the craving for depth, pain, contact. These girls, the children of refugees from Vietnam, are raised like hothouse flowers in that large substratum (more like a black hole) of pure striving in American culture, the world of get ahead, get good grades, be better, make a better life, don’t stop.

May arrived in 1978 when she was 4. Her stepfather had fallen off the boat and drowned. Her real father, imprisoned in Vietnam, did not escape until 1986. Secret lives, secret pasts.

Both May and her sister Darcy are heartbreakingly vulnerable; Darcy is virtually unable to tell a naked intruder to leave her apartment -- not out of fear for her life but for fear of somehow offending or betraying him.

Leena, whose businessman husband has left her at home in their big Texas house, is so trapped in her own beauty that she seems barely, and certainly tenuously, connected to the real world.

Strom, author of “Grass Roof, Tin Roof,” has a way of telling a great deal about how her characters feel in any given moment; having little to grab onto, they are in constant flux, perpetually vague and so are easily swept into the lassitude of their peers. Strom has a fascinating, oblique voice. She seems to be speaking into the distance, past the reader, not to him.