ENTERTAINMENT

In this collection of 10 well-written short stories, San Antonio writer Andrew Porter focuses on people we know: co-workers, neighbors, relatives, friends. His settings also are familiar: suburban neighborhoods, college campuses, the interiors of cars, the interface between city and country.

Indeed, his characters' lives seem placid and idyllic on the surface. Yet underneath, they are roiled by secrets.

Comparisons to John Cheever leap to mind, particularly the late writer's focus on suburban life and the duality of human nature. Yet the secrets borne by Mr. Porter's middle-class characters are not the burdens of desperate or corrupt people. Indeed, the secrets tend to be quite commonplace.

In the story "Merkin," for example, a teacher helps a neighbor keep her lesbian lifestyle secret from her father by pretending to be her boyfriend each time Dad shows up. And the ruse isn't too difficult to maintain, with a little rehearsal. The old guy usually just wants to talk about himself and his favorite Democrat, Lyndon Johnson.

In the collection's title story, a young woman engaged to a medical student tries to continue her secret, yet platonic, relationship with a married professor twice her age. She knows their close friendship will look like an affair if her fiancé finds out. But the ease she feels in the professor's company gives her the sense that she has "known him in some deeper way all my life." Meanwhile, she has convinced herself that "the only truth lies in the secrets we keep from each other" and exposing a secret "simply makes it everyone's injury."

The narrator in "Storms" tries to get his sister to reveal why she suddenly left her boyfriend in Europe and took off with his money and his passport. When she finally confesses what really happened, the events turn out to be benign. Still, the sister makes her brother swear to keep the truth from their mother. "It'll be easier if she thinks it was my fault," the sister says.

Loss, sacrifice, choice and responsibility are some of the other themes tightly woven into this impressive debut story collection.

Si Dunn reviews books about Texas and the Southwest.

Andrew Porter

(University of Georgia, $24.95)