News from the Defeated

STORIES (309 pp.)--Jean Stafford, John Cheever, Daniel Fuchs, William Maxwell--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.95).

The writers of these 15 short stories have several things in common. They are middle-aged (ranging from 41 to 48) and have thus been exposed to two world wars and a depression. They are Northerners, so their theme is largely urban frustration instead of the fashionable Southern predilection for rural decay. And like most contemporary short-story writers, they are at their best when remembering their childhood. The exception to this rule is Brooklynite Daniel Fuchs, who here ignores adolescence and is the only one of the four to deal with the excitements of earning a living.

Author Fuchs's three stories are lit with flashes of gallows humor, particularly Twilight in Southern California, in which an egocentric Pagliacci of the novelty business grimaces and clowns his way through a party while his firm takes the long slide into bankruptcy. The finance company has his Cadillac; creditors are massing like enemy battalions; the money men don't answer their phones when he calls--and the harried businessman responds like a hermit in the grip of a mystical experience: "He saw it all. He couldn't stop talking. He would get his backing, he would recoup, he would be a power in the industry again. Everyone would smile. He would be popular, universally admired. His visions soared ..." Just as quickly, his hopes plummet. But at the story's end, there is the feeling that a man who has already dodged disaster in Berlin, in Prague and in Paris will suffer only slight damage in Southern California.

Five of the stories are by Jean Stafford, the biggest name and most accomplished craftsman of the group. Mostly, she is writing communiques in the unceasing wars between children and adults and between the innocent and the worldly. Her work is marred by a truly feminine absorption in detail so that sometimes she seems to be writing for visitors from Mars, as in Bad Characters with its loving description of a 5 & 10-c- store, and in Beatrice Trueblood's Story with its total recall of a short ride in a self-service elevator ("an asphyxiating chamber with a fan that blew a withering scirocco; its tinny walls were embossed with a meaningless pattern of fleurs-de-lis; light, dim and reluctant, came through a fixture with a shade of some ersatz material," etc.). Author Stafford is best where her heart is, in fictitious Adams. Colo., a town she loves and hates in about equal measure.

William Maxwell's What Every Boy Should Know is perhaps the most moving and wryly humorous story in the book. Set in a Midwestern small town, it tells of young Edward Gellert's stumbling entry into puberty and the total failures of communication between the very young and the rest of the world.

Competence and shrewd observation mark just about every story in the book, as well as the studied understatement typical of The New Yorker (where most of the stories first appeared). The characters are sufficiently out of the focus of normality to be interesting and in desperate enough straits to be sympathetic. But the book also suggests a reason for contemporary writers' addiction to childhood and adolescence. The adults they write of are already tamed by society; their rebellions are mostly internal, and defeat is accepted and expected. The youngsters are foredoomed to defeat, too, but they go down fighting, and there is no guarantee that they will not fight again.

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