TRADING PLACES

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

IN EVERY GROWN WOman there is an inner teenage girl--an awkward, dissatisfied someone who longs to be a more alluring someone else. This sadly enduring truth is explored with affecting accuracy in Emerald City (Doubleday; 178 pages; $22.50), a collection of short stories by Jennifer Egan, whose first novel, The Invisible Circus, was published last year to critical praise and encouraging sales.

Egan's heroines spend their days fixating on other women. In Letter to Josephine, Lucy, a wealthy housewife on holiday with her husband, obsesses over a tall young woman she notices on the beach and takes to spying on. In the process Lucy comes to believe that this apparition is the passionate, sexually confident woman she, Lucy, will never be. A year later she thinks she has spotted the woman again but can't be sure, sparking a series of reflections--on the woman, on the vacation, on her life of privileged frustration--that force Lucy to confront the emptiness at her core. It's a quiet but disturbing moment, emblematic of Egan's skill.

Elsewhere, she deftly depicts the ways in which women can create glamorously detailed personas for one another based on passing observations of dress or manner. In Sacred Heart, the finest story in the collection, a girl named Sarah grows fascinated by a mysterious new classmate, Amanda. "She wore silver bracelets embedded with chunks of turquoise," notes Sarah, "and she would cross her legs and stare into space in a way that suggested she lived a dark and troubled life." Amanda eventually loses her mystique, of course, but through her the heroine fashions a singular identity of her own.

Egan does make a few missteps. In Why China? and the title story, she dabbles in a world of fallen bond traders, photographers and fashion models with names like Vesuvi and Anouschka. Their problems, at least as detailed here, cannot be taken seriously. Egan needs to leave these folks to Darren Star--she's too talented a writer to go slumming on Central Park West.

--By Ginia Bellafante