Come-Ons

By Paul Gray

MY HARD BARGAIN by Walter Kirn

Knopf; 145 pages; $18.95

In his first book, a collection of 13 short stories, Walter Kirn demonstrates a flair for opening sentences. He understands the allure of the odd: "The whole way down to Phoenix in the car, my job was to tranquilize the dog." He knows firearms are likely to arouse interest: "Luckily, I had a gun hidden away." And he senses that puzzlements invite curiosity: "He'd always liked motels even better than sleeping at home -- they provided the essentials and left a man to himself; but in New York City they'd only have hotels, and Clarence Dahlgren felt confused."

Better still, Kirn's stories live up to the promise of their intriguing come-ons, although in quirky, unpredictable ways. Tranquilizing the dog turns out to be one of the lesser problems facing the young narrator of My Hard Bargain. On the long drive from Wisconsin to Arizona, where he has been told a better life beckons, Wade begins to realize that his parents have not only pulled up stakes but are racing to leave each other as well. The gun that introduces The Steward never goes off. Instead the Midwestern farm boy called upon to protect his grandparents, mother and brother from a lunatic reported to be in the area encounters nothing but a heightened awareness of the tedium of family routines.

And Dahlgren does not actually reach Manhattan in Toward the Radical Church, the strongest story in this collection. Dahlgren has been invited to fly to the big city to speak to a presumably rich congregation about the plight of farmers back in the nation's heartland. To steel him for his trip, Dahlgren's two grown sons take him out for an extended night of barhopping, where the old widower almost succeeds in picking up a woman to take home. But she slips away, just as his farm has been doing for years.

These stories are not as somber as their subject matter suggests. Kirn, who . grew up in Minnesota before heading east to Princeton and then a career in journalism, never condescends to his beleaguered characters. He allows them the dignity of feeling responsible for their mistakes and the virtue of hoping, against the evidence of their experience, that things will get better.