The Virginian-Pilot
                            THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT  
              Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, August 28, 1994                TAG: 9408300382
SECTION: COMMENTARY               PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JEFFREY H. RICHARDS 
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   73 lines

MIDDLE-CLASS ANGST BEARS BITTER FRUIT

RARE & ENDANGERED SPECIES

RICHARD BAUSCH

Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence. 257 pp. $22.95.

There is nothing especially exotic about Richard Bausch's new collection of stories and one novella, but a mature writer does not require pyrotechnics to engage readers. People and situations in these pieces seem so typical of white middle-class life in America that the surprise consists largely of their closeness to the worries and losses faced by neighbors and friends.

Bausch, a resident of Broad Run, Va., explores little moments for all their complexity, and finds drama as often in the unspoken as in any intemperate word. Even when large events occur, the author moves the microphone and camera away from the dead, listening and watching for the spontaneous gestures of the quick.

The first story, ``Aren't You Happy for Me?'', records a telephone conversation between a 44-year-old father and a twentysomething daughter about her impending marriage to a 63-year-old literature professor. Ballinger is stunned by the news and turns his shock into sarcasm, taunting Melanie with such lines as ``Was there a senior citizen-student mixer at the college?'' Bausch complicates Ballinger's reactions, however, with what the character has not told Melanie - that he and her mother, Mary, are planning a separation. Once the recriminations have run their course, Ballinger finds both darkness and silence settling over his hopes for some different life than he now encounters.

Another story where bitterness and romance make a strange brew is ``Tandolfo the Great.'' Tandolfo is a children's party magician with an ache in his heart for a woman who hardly knows him. A little drunk, he shows up for a gig at a yuppie's birthday fete, an event Bausch skewers with relentless detail. The kids are all brats, and the parents act as if they own Tandolfo; the party climaxes in disaster as the magician's ``inebriate heart'' gets the better of his patience. Yet what Bausch makes clear here, and in another story, ``Weather,'' is that people's daily conflicts and antagonisms are filled with misreadings of others' motives and histories.

Through this rank inefficiency of human interaction, people fail each other at every turn. ``The Person I Have Mostly Become'' concerns a man without work, living in tense circumstances with his wife, son and mother. Once prosperously middle-class, he now watches his mother go to work as a domestic - the only income the family has. When the always optimistic Ruth tells her son that the woman she cleans for may have a remodeling job, he goes along, suffering inside from chronic humiliation. Bausch squeezes out every drop of petty and larger discomfort in the situation, leaving us at the end with the man's unanswerable questions.

Despite the disappointments in many of these stories, Bausch is finally a writer who affirms some basic desire in people for justice and understanding. In the title novella, he pursues the rippling effects of the suicide of Andrea Brewer, whose action we see but whose motives remain hidden from reader and character alike. Her married children, their spouses, her husband, her friends, even family or students of her friends all respond directly or obliquely to Andrea's death. Without her, everyone's little bandages peel off, exposing the running sores of anger and guilt beneath.

Bausch maneuvers with uncommon skill from one character to another, adding some pieces to Andrea's puzzle, but never letting the suicide itself become the point. The final scene, a labor and childbirth, brings together with humor and pain the welter of confusions and joys that such a moment elicits. Whatever characters leave undone or unsaid - and often there is a great deal - none is fully forsaken by the understanding creator. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by SARA EISENMAN

by CNB