Whoever Finds Thislove You

The litany to self-pity that these stories intone makes reader empathy redundant. Each protagonist neglects and thus alienates the significant other in her life, as if the woe that besets her were hers alone. In ``A Leak in the Heart,'' we are offered a dead baby, an inconsolable mother and a presumably untouched father, denied the sexual congress that, one infers, for the wife never amounted to more than obedience to her marriage vows. ``Irene'' also seems only provisionally married, to a man whose paycheck she squanders and whose unsatisfactory child she bears, driven by her uneventful existence to shopping sprees and stealing. Almost equally despondent is ``Thelma,'' a young girl victimized both by the penuriousness of her family and the outrageous size of her nose, conditions made interdependent by the refusal of her mother to pay for plastic surgery. Nicely fashioned prose and a sprinkling of brilliant images notwithstanding, the overall dolor of this collection muffles even the most graceful of authorial touches. (June)