Disorderly Conduct

Although some entries are underdeveloped or are self-consciously wacky, this collection of stories from the Village Voice Literary Supplement , of which Mark is editor-in-chief, generally is energized with a quirky sensibility. Russell Banks's protagonist, who as a child was a pawn in his parents' tortured relationship, confronts the ghosts at the last home his family shared before his parents divorced. This character and his cathartic, moving tale are anomalies here. More the norm in this volume are Pagan Kennedy's young UPS worker, who has herself tattooed with an image of an upside-down Jesus hanging on an upside-down cross and hones an Elvis passion with a guitar player, he lately of a band called The Benign Tumors; Lynda Schor's narrator, who fantasizes about scantily clad pubescent males as her teenage daughter competes at a swim-team tryout; and Michael Musto's jaded reporter, who tracks the seamy side of the party scene, discovering such notables as a woman who ``squirts milk from her bosoms at a nightclub audience.'' Most effectively, Janice Eidus beckons readers into the twilight zone with her sanguine heroine, Geraldine, who, as the years pass, stays stuck firmly in the 1950s, when she was the most popular girl in her Bronx crowd. (Oct.)