Promise from the Heartland

THE ANATOMY LESSON AND OTHER STORIES (214 pp.)--Evan S. Connell Jr.

--Viking ($3.50).

Opening a collection of short stories by a new writer is often like dipping into a sample box of chocolates : the unwary are apt to be brought down by a surfeit of soft centers or too many brandied cherries. In this book there is no such hazard. Its eleven stories are all rock-hard and novel in flavor.

Author Connells most frequent theme is the failure of human beings to communicate with one another. In the title story, a dusty professor in a dusty Midwest college tries desperately to explain the purpose of art to his attentive life class, which is embarrassed by life. The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge flashes a series of suburban snapshots of a well-intentioned matron who might just as well be calling to Mars for all the contact she makes with her friends, her relatives or herself. The Walls 'of Avila has fun with the return of the native: an expatriate comes home after ten years abroad to be greeted with both the restless impatience of busy men who have more to do than listen to a traveler's tales and the envy of those who realize that life is slipping by without their having done any of the things they have dreamed of.

Many of Connell's tales turn on the conflict between Bohemian and Philistine. What is refreshing about them is that the cards never seem stacked on one side or the other. His Philistine realizes that a magic has gone out of his life, that "things were different now. The winged seeds that gyrate down from the trees now mean nothing else but that we must sweep them from the automobile hood because stains on the finish lower the trade-in value." And his bohemian is intelligent enough to recognize and be shamed by his own posing. At the peak of his talkativeness and charm, he "commences to doubt the impression he is making."

Author Connell, 32, is a Missourian who has been a premedical student at Dartmouth, a Navy flyer, and a wanderer in the U.S. and the world. His writing is both vivid and various, and its weaknesses are the sort that promise future strength. In his refusal to make explicit judgments -- leaving it to the reader to draw his own conclusions -- Connell has made his first steps in the direction of the goal set by that master of the short story, James Joyce, who argued that "the artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, paring his fingernails."

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