WORKING WOMEN

A well-crafted if lackluster first collection of 14 stories by a capable new writer in the Bobbie Ann Mason/Frederick Barthelme tradition. Dreams, illusions, and the attrition of love are Bauer's principal themes, with many of the pieces narrated in the likable, world-weary voice of a woman in her early 20s. In the elegiac ``Beds,'' the narrator returns home to discover that her parents have moved to separate rooms; in ``Dancing With the Movies,'' dreams of escape from the mundane briefly enliven the citizens of a town that's being used as a film site. And in ``Fortunes,'' a young woman visits a psychic with her mother and her mother's friends, and is overjoyed to learn that she'll ascend above this blue-collar life. A would-be investigative journalist (in ``Pot o' Gold'') infiltrates a suspect game-prize magazine, only to realize that she can't jeopardize the low-paying clerical jobs the women working there desperately need. With gentle irony, Bauer implies that escaping one's class is not necessarily the ticket to a happier life. Elsewhere, she goes beyond implication and irony and draws conclusions for the reader instead. In ``Gypsies,'' as a couple fights caterpillars that have attacked their oak tree, we observe their marriage changing. Bauer doesn't need to add the obvious: ``Joe kissed her again. Wasn't thisjust this unionwhat they really were working so hard for?'' This tendency to sum things up also mars ``Dogs,'' in which a daughter who's left home gives dogs to her father as surrogates for his grown children. She concludes, much in the fashion of popular magazine articles on pet therapy, ``We invested in them all the secrets we could never speak among ourselves.'' Themes and characters, then, that are drawn with empathy, although a tendency toward needless exposition mars the collection.