An American Genre

Back in the World

By Tobias Wolff

Bantam; 221 pages; $7.95.

I am Having an Adventure

By Perri Klass

G.P. Putnam's Sons; 253 pages; $17.95.

Drunk with Love

By Ellen Gilchrist

Little, Brown & Co.; 239 pages; $15.95.

NOBODY CAN DENY that great novels are a dime a dozen in Latin America.

Credo: there are real problems in Latin America--war, hunger, anarchy and Catholicism. The novel is an expansive, flexible literary form. It can mimic the diffuse, confusing format of a world run amok.

In industrial societies like the U.S., however, the problems are less spectacular. In our society there's more leisure for introspection. Too much introspection leads to boredom and boredom makes people go crazy, as a character from Tobias Wolff's short story collection, Back in the World, implies as he speaks about his experiences in Vietnam:

"Everything was clear," he said. "You learned what you had to know and you forgot the rest. All this chicken shit...You didn't spend every living minute of the day thinking about your own sorry-ass little self. Am I getting laid enough. What's wrong with my kid. Should I insulate the fucking house. That's what does it to you, Porchoff. Thinking about yourself. That's what kills you in the end."

Recent short stories in America are chronicling the American malaise of boredom. In much the same way that Latin American writers have made the novel a symbol of the fantastic convolutions and discombobulations of their history, American short story writers choose their form to mimic the small problems that beset us. A novel about boredom would be boring.

A PRESS release on the collection of short stories by Perri Klass '79, I am Having an Adventure, says that Klass--a 1986 graduate of Harvard Medical School, a columnist for Discover and the mother of a two-year-old--"has discovered that writing short stories fits nicely around the edges of her life."

Would that Klass had lavished a little more artistic pretension on her fiction. Written at different times while Klass was a graduate student in zoology, doing field work in Central America, living in Rome and attending medical school, these stories document in theme--rather than form--a disenchantment with sameness. The thematic concerns are all the same. The stories all speak of restless students who are usually also relentless travelers. You get the feeling there are only a few real characters, chopped up and shooed into all the stories.

Another problem with the stories is that introspection constantly muddies the portrayal of all the rotting relationships of which Klass writes. In "In Africa" the lover complains that he doesn't know what his girlfriend did all the time she was in Africa. The man in "A Gift of Sweet Mustard" imagines that his unemployed wife is carrying on an affair while he is at work during the day. Their anxiety and its aftermath of malaise isn't necessary. They are either too empty-headed or devious in a way that the author has completely neglected to clarify. Why don't they just ask?

THERE ARE SOME striking similarities between Klass' work and Ellen Gilchrist's Drunk with Love. Both document floundering relationships. Both authors create characters who are obsessed with appearances. Each collection includes a story about a diet. Klass' story, "The Secret Lives of Dieters," traces the disintegration of a relationship throughout a diet. Gilchrist's is bathetic. It opens with a report of the death of JeanAnne Lori Mayfield who ended the last diet she ever undertook by crashing into a doughnut shop, killing two people.

The son of one of these victims finds JeanAnne Lori's diary which describes her feelings as she progresses into the final throes of her diet. The story ends with the boy giving a chubby little girl some money to buy ice cream. It's all rather obvious and impossible and not very poignant.

Gilchrist's strength lies in her portrayal of girls and women like JeanAnne Lori, real hellions who drive everybody around them to distraction. One of the most famous is the precocious nine-year old heroine of Victory over Japan--for which Gilchrist won the 1984 American Book Award--Rhoda Manning. She is nasty--a smart, nasty child with a wild imagination. But the women in Drunk with Love are too flashy, too angry and too loud. They don't seem to suffer from living; they are born misfits, albeit amusing and erudite.

As for the men in Gilchrist's stories, there aren't any good ones. The relationships falter and die because of the men who are narrow-minded like Rhoda's father, or selfish like the married man in "Anna, Part I" or downright violent like the Lebanese immigrant in "The Emancipator" and the Black husband in "Memphis."

The last two are stories in which young blonde women are murdered by the men they marry for love. The stories fall short of convincing because it seems as if Gilchrist is trying to sound a warning against interracial marriages. In "First Manhattans" when it is apparent that Annalisa Livingston and Kenny, her Black chauffeur are going to sleep together, Gilchrist has Kenny think, "these white women go crazy if you make them come." At this point the reader balks. Is the verbal riot in the dialogue of the women just sound and fury camouflaging stereotype?

TOBIAS WOLFF'S Back in the World melodiously fleshes out the improbably festive-sounding trinity of titles of these contemporary short story collections: I Am Having an Adventure, Drunk with Love and Back in the World. This collection however doesn't commit itself to either the confused soul-searching that goes on in Klass' book or the heady hothouse passions that obscure some disturbing authorial attitudes in Drunk with Love.

Wolff, who won the 1985 PEN/Faulkner award for the novella "The Barracks Thief," writes accurately about the myriad isolations of military life. "The Barracks Thief" is about a boy so angry he has no space for other emotions; he falls naturally into soldiering. "Soldier's Joy" hearkens back to the emotional territory of "The Barracks Thief." The story, like its predecessor, is about how soldiers socialize, or fail to socialize with one another.

Back in the World is refreshing for its variety. "Soldier's Joy" is a venture into despair that we almost don't escape. "The Missing Person," on the other hand, has a protagonist who is almost as strange and lost and cynical as his counterpart in "Soldier's Joy." He is a priest whom life has clubbed with one disgrace after another, but who begins a quiet, enduring love affair with a woman he meets by chance at a hotel.

"Desert Breakdown, 1968" is a consummately terrifying story. It is about a couple on their way to California to start the proverbial new life, when their car breaks down. The conflict begins when the man decides to hitchhike to the nearest town and leaves his wife and son with the car at an outpost in the middle of the desert. Some very spooky cowboy types hang out at the outpost. The story is about betrayal, but it is almost Gothic in the way it renders the stillness of the blank desert and the pink-cheeked yokels grotesque and terrifying.

THE WOLFF STORIES seem at first discrete items of interest about a soldier, or a priest or the strangeness of people who live in the desert. But they bloom from the particular to the universal. Listen to the socially marginalized protagonist of "Soldier's Joy":

"We used to talk about how when we got back in the world we were going to do this and we were going to do that. Back in the world we were going to have it made. But ever since then its been nothing but confusion."

Upon close examination these stories like discrete planets plump out and touch each other and merge into a world we recognize, a world of heartbreaking relationships and loneliness, yet also of love.