TWICE UPON A TIME

Stern (An Urban Affair, 1980, etc.), a polished and generous writer in his novels, has developed a small literary vaudeville act. In 1989's Twice Told Tales, and in this new collection, he has taken as a premise that books ``could be basic to a fiction; as basic as a love affair, a trauma, a house, a mother, a landscape, a lover, a job, or a sexual passion.'' Like homages to recently fashionable critical ideas (the erotics of reading, reader-response theory), the six stories here choose poems or novels, even The Communist Manifesto, to be pivots around which the characters directly spin—and which they indirectly reconstitute. The artifice is stifling. Except for one, the stories bob around in their literary brines unable to address anything beyond the radius of a creative-writing workshop. The only one that truly works—``Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville'': a hack screenwriter's final noncompliance—works because it speaks of Hollywood knowledge, and of people caught, even destroyed by, that knowledge. Nothing else in the book has this emotional reflux. Careful but charmless.