EVEN-TEMPERED, UNFLASHY STORIES OF AMERICA'S HEARTLAND

Author: By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 23, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

Baxter, who has just published his fourth collection of short fiction, ``Believers,'' might cringe at that perception. Along with ``Believers,'' he has just published a book of essays on fiction called ``Burning Down the House,'' in which he writes persuasively ``against epiphanies'' and the convenient insights writers often force at the ends of stories. But rather than offering facile or fashionably quirky bits of take-out wisdom, Baxter's endings heighten the questions central to the story, lifting the story into the realm of quandary. His endings are pleasingly inconclusive. In ``Reincarnation,'' one of the strongest pieces in ``Believers,'' a dinner party becomes a drunken conversation about death and endings. But gradually, as the friends move out under the stars, the tone shifts into hostility about the delusions people adopt to ignore death. ``The lucky deaf,'' one of the more stricken members notes.

That phrase, ``The lucky deaf,'' could serve as a subtitle to ``Believers.'' In a number of stories, Baxter looks at what people choose to believe to protect themselves from the surrounding darkness. What makes us feel safe, or invincible, or in love? What pieces of knowledge do we reject in order to believe? The opening story, ``Kiss Away,'' begins as a charming, low-budget courtship between Jodie and Walton. But when one of Walton's ex-girlfriends urgently tells Jodie that Walton used to beat her, Jodie decides not to believe her. She prefers to believe Walton's dog, Einstein, who looks at Walton ``with straightforward dog love.'' She throws away the Rolling Stones album with the lyrics Walton once quoted to her -- ``Rape, murder, are just a kiss away'' -- and she throws away the fear of the mysteries of loving another person.

In ``Flood Show,'' the entire town of Eurekaville seems to be happily denying danger -- that of the rising water of the Chaska River. When the Chaska floods every three years, the town likes to perceive it as a ritualistic recreational activity: ``This year, the Eurekaville High School junior class has brought bleachers down from the gym and set them up on the paved driveway of the park's northwest slope, close to the river itself, where you can get a good view of the waterlogged trash floating by.'' But one man, still fixated on his rejection by his first wife 14 years before, enters the moving water and almost loses his life. If he wants to protect his present home, it seems, he'll have to stay out of that river of real emotion.

The last piece in the collection, ``Believers,'' is a novella that moves counter to many of the stories. The events are narrated by Jack Pielke, who is trying to construct a cohesive tale about his father's decision to leave the priesthood and belief in God many years earlier. It's a fairly predictable plot, in which Father Pielke takes a trip to Germany in 1938, where he is exposed to fascistic inhumanities through a decadent and deceptive couple and ``never again felt God moving in him.'' What saves the novella from sheer historical cliche is its self-consciousness about the act of storytelling, as Jack struggles to find truth about his father among his own memories and those of the people who experienced it firsthand. ``Believers'' is as much about Jack's acceptance of the lack of absolute truth as it is about his father's turning away from God during the Holocaust.

Since the mid-1980s, Baxter has been publishing even-tempered fiction that depends on moral and emotional issues, and not stylistic flash, for its power. Mostly set in the Midwest, his fiction makes the American universal in ways that are fresh and unforced. ``Believers'' joins the ranks of Baxter's other story collections, and his first novel, the backward-moving ``First Light,'' as a work of substance and subtlety.