Fetish Lives

Australian writer Jones makes her American debut with these engaging, occasionally brilliant dozen stories, most of which take fragmented paths to explore the myths of well-known figures of the past. Jones often uses elliptical structures, but her clear and graceful prose keeps these stories from veering into pretension, though they occasionally brush up against it. In the best entries, such as ""The Veil,"" Jones is less interested in the lives of the historical figures she chooses (in this case Mata Hari) than in the nimbus of legend that surrounds them. The danger in writing about well-known figures is that, at a few weak moments, her stories seem more like historical sketches than fleshed-out fiction. ""Resuscitating Proust,"" for example, adds disappointingly little to our received wisdom about the man and his famous quirks. Much more often, however, Jones turns well-known anecdotes into stories of her own--as, for instance, in ""Eleanor Reads Emma,"" about Karl Marx's daughter and her obsession with Madame Bovary (which Eleanor Marx was the first to translate into English). Accessible, sophisticated, unabashedly intellectual, these stories sound an unusual and very welcome note among Australia's very finest recent literary exports. (Sept.)