INVENTING THE ABBOTTS AND OTHER STORIES

The faint but persistent acrid undertone of Miller's best-seller of last season, The Good Mother (its popular focus, a child-abuse custody case), dominates these 11 short stories in which an unhappy mix of divorced or partner-hopping lovers and parents—both young and middle-aged, all middle class—fumble at self-determination, with random grabs at status or security or, simply, drama in a drifting life. Miller's people—most of them vaguely bothered most of the time—when it comes to a grip on the Good Life, are all thumbs. In the title story, a young man becomes obsessed with the daughters of the richest man in his tiny midwestern town, since, fatherless early, and with a distracted mother, he needed a status-y "sense of place." Yet like the mother in "The Abbotts," who will watch her son lope foolishly after bogus American status, the young grandmother in "Leaving Home," living within the miserable marriage of her son, knows that she has "no power to stave off ruin. . .to guard her son against his share of pain." Meanwhile, women court depression; in "Slides," yesterday's nude photos, which stirred an ex-husband, only underscore time past with an aging lover; and in "Travel," a woman traveling in a small South American country, with a deal-making, exploitative lover, capitulates lo American privilege and self-loathing. And men strut in foolish sexual rituals: one is a telephone freak who, at the close, is repeatedly ringing a recorded message; and a "man who loved women" sleeps with two, feeling, since he was passionately involved, that he was "faithful to both." The story of a young mother who wanders from the boring bed of her eighth lover to assemble her son's toy train ("Expensive Gifts") contains the central image, as the disconnected cars (like disconnected families) have a way of magnetically repelling one another when clumsily manipulated. An adventurous, chilly collection of stories, some with a John Cheever-ish bite, about uncoupled lives rattling on into isolation.