ENTERTAINMENT

The End of the Straight and Narrow

David McGlynn

(SMU Press, $22.50)

David McGlynn's debut collection of well-crafted short stories stays in the mind longer than most books. That is because he writes patiently and well about real people suddenly facing ultimate issues. Some turn to God; some turn away. There are lots of surprises.

The first section of the book contains four stories, each with different characters and with settings from California to Texas. The second section, set in Houston and its surroundings, is really a mini-novel consisting of five stories about the same family. Fortuitously timely, this Houston part includes a destructive hurricane, and the California story has a threatening fire.

Mr. McGlynn grew up in Houston, and his descriptions of places and people there seem especially apt. Rowdy, who narrates "The Eyes to See," describes a party in his grandparents' back yard where guests two-stepped toward the bar and "On the way they passed my mother, dancing alone, the universe shining in her prosthetic eye."

Now he's got your attention, and he won't let it go.

Rowdy feels guilt for his mother Cordelia's condition, but in the course of the stories is released from that feeling, as it becomes clear that her loss of vision was only a small part of her complicated reality. The family secrets they all tolerated for so long had to be given up, swum away from in the end.

The author is a distance swimmer and makes good use of that experience in his stories. When Cordelia swims out to sea, you see it and feel it, as if you were there.

In a Part One story, "Seventeen One-Hundredths of a Second," Charlie, dead when the story begins, had once qualified for the Olympic Trials by precisely that fraction of time. It was time enough to separate him forever from Jonah, his friend who did not make the trials. This story is about male competition, as well as about love, guilt and salvation.

It is funny as well as sensitive. For example, Mr. McGlynn gives this description of how weary Charlie's widow grew of the casseroles well-meaning people brought her: "She was tired of the dinners that showed up, tired of lasagnas and potpies in crumpled aluminum trays, tired of casserole dishes popping with boiled chicken and burnt cheese, tired of crusted, storebought cakes ... She wanted to go someplace loud."

On the frontispiece, Mr. McGlynn quotes Walker Percy (The Moviegoer ) on sin, and the way people sin so little nowadays. "The highest moment of a malaisian's life," Percy writes, "can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human."

The stories in Mr. McGlynn's book touch on such moments, and how they affect the so-called sinners. He writes intelligently about young people and their burdens, carried into later life. He also writes well about how one feels death and loss.

Anne Morris, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Austin.