Chattering Man

In this collection of short fiction, cranky, defiant Anna Goldman lives in two cramped rooms, each with a piano. A fugitive from New York's Lower East Side, Anna, now in her 70s, lives in Los Angeles where she gives concerts at a community center to ``the blood pressure bunch and the Alzheimer's gang.'' Watching over her daughter Carol, a widow of a suicide, Anna trades insults with her two TV-lobotomized grandchildren. She sleeps with a Hemlock Society card by her bedside. ``The Anna Stories: A Novella'' is a wonderfully wry look at the outrageous indignities of old age. In the remaining eight tales, veering from the absurd to the tragic, Gerber ( King of the World ) portrays with accuracy and compassion characters who include an insecure, too-hip college couple in Berkeley, Calif., a Brooklyn inventor of chicken-skin sandwiches, a quack gynecologist in Miami, newlyweds in Boston. (Sept.)