New Short Stories

DOMESTIC RELATIONS, by Frank O'Connor (260 pp.; Knopf; $3.50), introduces an engaging child named Larry Delaney who wants to know where babies come from. His father says that they are dropped from airplanes, while his mother explains that "mummies had an engine in their tummies and daddies had a starting handle that made it work, and once it started it went on until it made a baby." But his schoolmates convinced Larry that his mother is all wrong. Una Dwyer giggles that everyone knows babies are bought from Nurse Daly, and one boy asserts that he himself floated down "on a snowflake, wearing a bright blue dress."

This episode from The Genius, one of the 15 short stories in Author O'Connor's new book, contains most of the ingredients that make him an accomplished reporter of the emotions: wry humor about family life, a nostalgia for childhood, an affectionately gentle treatment of the confusions between old and young. In The Duke's Children. O'Connor touches on the mythology of all the sensitive young who are convinced they must have sprung from nobler loins than those of their earthbound parents; in Fish for Friday, a man's race for the doctor to attend his pregnant wife is slowed to an alcoholic crawl by a succession of pubs and pals until the quest finally blurs into a blue forgetfulness; in A Bachelor's Story, crusty Archie Boland comes to the belated knowledge that his one narrow escape from matrimony was actually his last chance of happiness. Author O'Connor's stories are best read individually, for taken together they show a certain sameness of ideas, treatment, even phrasing. At his worst, O'Connor slips into the bathetic romanticism of the late Donn (The Woman of the Shee) Byrne; at his best, he writes like a James Joyce who has kissed the Blarney stone.

ROMAN TALES, by Alberto Moravia (229 pp.; Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; $3.75), seems to concern the ignoblest Romans of them all. Moravia's people live in small tenement rooms, work in brickyards, junkyards and poor taverns by the summer-shrunken Tiber. On Moravia's showing, at least, it is easy to see how their ancestors managed to run the world with very little show of conscience. Yet, though Moravia's characters lack conscience--though they are bent on mean personal advantage and are forever trying to trip their fellows into the gutter--they are all also victims themselves. In Taboo, a story about a shop clerk who steals his friend's girl with fancy talk of his own mysterious powers. Author Moravia suggests his moral: the poor must resign themselves to being cheated. The best of the 27 stories is The Girl from Ciociaria, about a simple peasant wench who works as a maid for a professor and steals books from him. One day, in a fit of conscience, she decides to make good her theft--but while the books she stole were on archaeology, the ones she returns are about law. The girl cannot understand her employer's anger: "They're the same bindings . . . They weigh just the same . . . Five there were, and five there are now." Not all of Author Moravia's works weigh the same; these stories are considerably lighter than the best of his novels (The Fancy Dress Party, Conjugal Love). But while Moravia's stories may lack charity and depth, his settings are hauntingly real, and his characters are as convincing in their speech as they are moving for their philosophy of resignation.

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