UNDER THE LIGHT

Fifteen stories, set in Montana and Nevada: part Hemingway sparseness, part lush poetry that's sometimes overwritten—two kinds of fiction seen recently in the pages of The Quarterly, where several of these first appeared. Though a character named Harry Drake is used to interlink all of these pieces, the same Harry doesn't appear in every story. That is, there's little chronology or thematic coherence between most of these stories, and the use of Harry seems more a whim than useful connection. Even so, of the Hemingway clones, ``Smoke'' is a tense narrative about a down-on-his-luck Harry who lives in a cottage across from the Timmonses. He gets the hots for Mrs. Timmons, but she proves more than he bargained for when he enters her bedroom not to taste the ``bearded clam'' but to have her insert needles painfully into his blood blister. Of the stories drunk on their own prose, ``Reno, Reno, Reno, Reno'' is the best: Harry, with best friend Tom and dog Spivey, is tome to his wife after adultery; in ``I Am Not So Old,'' he flirts with a waitress while his wife has a baby; and in ``The Route,'' he visits his son, who (``either eleven or twelve'') drinks and curses lasciviously. A new voice from the West, in thrall to fictional fashion but beginning to find its way to originality.