A Citizen of the World

In her introduction to this striking collection of short fiction, Alice Hoffman describes Bocock as a writer who ""has long been admired by other writers."" The novella and 12 finely wrought stories offered here (five previously published by John Daniel in Heaven Lies About) prove Bocock has been honing her craft and distilling her work. In lean but lyrical prose, Bocock conjures diverse narrators for tales of remarkable variety. Her lapidary prose can as easily capture the arrogance of a European bureaucrat in northern Africa as the loneliness of an expatriate in Paris, or the strains between a young couple on a delayed honeymoon trip in the Southwest. The first five stories are set in the South, depicting swiftly but quietly some life-changing losses: of childhood, friends, parents, illusions. The most moving of these entries is ""Play Me `Stormy Weather,' Please,"" which tells of best friends, a white girl and a black boy, whose families separate them when they are on the verge of adolescence, and of love. With her gift for compression, Bocock manages to make the attraction between the boy and girl strong but unstated, but the story's real power grows out of an incident, narrated in counterpoint, by the girl, now a grandmother, who is mugged in Washington, D.C., by a man she is convinced is the son (or grandson) of her long-ago friend. In the title story, a Boston-born daughter of Jewish refugees flees to Paris and travels to the Soviet Union in an attempt to embrace an identity her parents rejected. A recurring theme in these narratives is the power struggle within a marriage. In ""The Face,"" a wife obsessed with protecting her artist husband all but imprisons him, while in the folktale-like ""The Baker's Daughter,"" a husband usurps his wife's bakery, confining her to her room while he grows wealthy. The complex novella, ""Alice and Me,"" depicts the reaction of a wife to her husband's betrayal, embracing in its closing passages both the hard and practical solution of living with infidelity and the possibility of dying for the demands of love. One of the rewards of Bocock's fiction is that it does not give up its secrets easily. These are rich, compressed stories that draw the reader in, venturing into familiar territory in unfamiliar ways and moving fearlessly into uncharted terrain. (June)