Bodysurfers

By Paul Gray

FINDING A GIRL IN AMERICA

by Andre Dubus Godine; 183 pages; $10.95

About halfway through this collection of ten short stories and a novella, a Class C minor league baseball player named Rick Stanley hits a home run: "It would happen again, in other ball parks, in other seasons; and if Stanley had been able to cause it instead of having it happen to him, he would be in the major leagues." Author Andre Dubus, 43, specializes in such people, interested but hapless spectators of their own lives. Although many of his characters are physically rooted in New England mill towns, they walk the streets as moral transients. "Should and shouldn't don't have much to do with feelings," says one. Lacking the control that a sense of right might bring, they simply bodysurf on the waves of their passions.

They frequently crash. In Townies a young drifter murders a college girl, less out of rage than helplessness; her announcement that she would no longer sleep with him in her dorm room makes him strike out at his own rejection-filled life. In Killings a man on the eve of graduate school is fatally shot by his girlfriend's estranged husband. A month later the father's grief still grows: "It was a cool summer night; he thought vaguely of the Red Sox, did not even know if they were at home tonight; since it happened he had not been able to think about any of the small pleasures he believed he had earned, as he had earned also what was shattered now forever: the quietly harried and quietly pleasurable days of fatherhood." The tide of such pain carries him inexorably toward blood vengeance.

Not all of Dubus' stories turn on overt violence; anguish sometimes comes through less dramatic but equally effective means. Of these, the most common are infidelity and divorce. It is hard to tell who suffers more, the wandering parents or their children. Delivering follows two thoroughly upset brothers on their newspaper route the morning after their mother and father noisily called it quits. In the title novella, Finding a Girl in America, Dubus picks up the saga of Hank Allison that he began in two earlier volumes of stories. Experiments in consensual philandering ultimately broke up the Allison marriage. Now Hank, 35, lives alone, teaches at a small Massachusetts college and has sequential affairs with matriculating young women: "What had been spice in his married twenties was now his sustenance." Not only does Hank find this diet unsatisfying, he worries about its effect on his teen-age daughter: "He does not want her girlhood and young womanhood to become a series of lovers . . . he does not, in fact, want her to be like his girlfriends."

Similarly, the divorced hero of The Winter Father must endure both the absence of his two small children during the week and the problem of entertaining them on weekends. He imagines owning an enormous building that would make life simple for fathers in his position: "A place of swimming pool, badminton and tennis courts, movie theaters, restaurants, soda fountains, batting cages, a zoo, an art gallery, a circus, aquarium, science museum, hundreds of restrooms, two always in sight, everything in the tender charge of women trained in first aid and Montessori, no uniforms, their only style warmth and cheer."

Such whimsy is rare in Dubus' fiction. At their best, his stories play on the nerve ends more than the mind. They are nei ther arrangements of aperc,us nor attenuated epiphanies; they try to make the reader feel first and ask questions later. It is fashionable at the moment to praise stories that are light, deft, clever and feathery, and Dubus' are not. But they convincingly render experience. The slices of life that he sets forth may not be to everyone's but no one can his talent or generosity. -- Paul Gray

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.