Collisions

By Paul Gray

THE LONE PILGRIM

by Laurie Colwin

Knopf; 211 pages; $9.95

Among its many other functions, fiction brings back news from the front lines of the war between the sexes. In recent years, such bulletins have made for increasingly grim reading: the men are swinish, the women strident, and most of the fun has gone out of the struggle. The 13 stories in The Lone Pilgrim thus offer what amounts to a minority report. Author Laurie Colwin is a remarkably cheerful messenger. She tells of women and men who somehow manage to live vibrantly through the problems they cannot solve and the fights they cannot win.

To be sure, Colwin's characters have some opening advantages. They are almost all civilized and basically decent. They do not need to worry about money. The women, in particular, share a gilded past as "the beautiful daughters of the nervous well-to-do." One remembers: "We were comfortable wherever we went, since anywhere was just like home: the same silk curtains, good oil paintings in heavy gold frames, big pantries and good food, chintz sofas, colored cooks and walnut coffee tables . . ." The girls grow out of these comfortable surroundings and into equally comfortable jobs. They become illustrators or work in bookstores or publishing houses. The men they meet and sometimes marry tend to be solid professional types and good providers.

So where are the problems? Colwin finds two and plays several variations on them. First, a young woman falls in love with a presentable man who would rather pine after her from afar than marry her. Complains the heroine of the title story: "Jacob wanted a grand event--something you would never forget but not something to live with. I wanted something to live with." In The Smile Beneath the Smile, a woman frets over the behavior of her hot-and-cold-running lover: "Andrew, if she agreed to see him again, would conduct their meetings like a series of two-car collisions. He would say he loved her and leave early."

On the other hand, the women who settle down with appropriate spouses are apt to find themselves committing adultery and worrying a great deal about it. Colwin on Polly, the heroine of Family Happiness: "Once she had divided the world into the sort of women who had love affairs and the sort of women who did not. But now she, a woman who did not, did, and with considerable expertise." In A Mythological Subject, a happily married woman begins an affair and torments herself with guilt and questions: "That she had fallen in love meant something. What did it say about herself . . . She did not believe that things simply happened."

Colwin's characters take themselves more seriously than does their author. She presents their moral writhings as both ad mirable (acts have consequences) and funny (things do simply happen). She also knows that people who get what they want will inevitably want something else: "The lovely thing about marriage is that life ambles on--as if life were some mean dering path lined with sturdy plane trees. A love affair is like a shot arrow. It gives life an intense direction, if only for an in stant." Colwin's witty, graceful stories convey both leisurely walks and sudden, unexpected sprints.

--By Paul Gray

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