The Peaceable Kingdom: Stories

Prose ( Primitive People ; Household Saints ) is a highly talented writer who in this collection of stories--most of them previously published in little magazines--seems to be seeking a subject. They are mostly about young, fairly sophisticated people in a vaguely artistic milieu who are profoundly at odds with each other and their world. Prose has a marvelous ear for the inanities of contemporary dialogue, and is continuously observant; there is never a time when she bores the reader or causes impatience, and she is often very funny. But readers will likely come away with little more than cool admiration for her intelligence and her rueful insights. In ``Amazing,'' for instance, a young puppeteer does his work at a party in the house of a wealthy and clearly dysfunctional family, only to be drawn into an odd and not very convincing encounter with the father of the household; in ``Potato World,'' a bright, disaffected girl on a trip to Paris with her father and his mistress is chased there by her hapless boyfriend, with disastrous results; ``Rubber Life'' is a sort of ghost story about a librarian and her best customer that ends, as so many of these stories do, with a symbolist flourish that is effective in itself but seems unrelated to what has gone before. Read one at a time these stories would probably seem more hip and entertaining than they do as a collection, where their similarities and frequent glibness are more apparent. (Sept.)