A Burden of Earth and Other Stories

These ethereal stories link together in surprising ways to give a rare, honest portrait of a thoroughly modern woman and, in so doing, artfully smudge the boundary between fact and fiction. While in the middle of making cookies with her large brood, Ruth, the protagonist and often the narrator, receives a strange phone call from her father, who is en route to speak about ``Transformational Grammar.'' The history behind this oblique conversation is only gradually revealed in the rest of the book. In ``Louise, Louise,'' Ruth recalls the games-sometimes sexual-she and her childhood friend played with a rather gross neighborhood boy. Ruth often interrupts her own narrative with probing questions that remain unanswered, as when she asks the reader, ``When we grow up, which one of us do you think will be a lesbian?'' She also teases with the book's self-referential structure. In ``Sheets,'' her mother confronts her about a story she discovered in Ruth's room-in which a girl much like Ruth is molested by a man much like her father-demanding to know whether it is based on fact. ``Vectors,'' the final entry, is that suspicious story itself. A piece about her brother, ``Nathaniel Among the Lamai,'' begins with a sensible prologue explaining that Ruth keeps ``writing Nathaniel into stories. Then I write him out.... So this is a story about my brother, Nathaniel.'' Although billed as a collection of short stories, this debut is more novelistic than many so-called novels; it's just less obvious. (Aug.)