Just Plain Stories

THE CHINA RUN (247 pp.)--Neil Paferson--Random House ($2.75).

Drifting on a lazy stream of subconsciousness, some modern short-story writers seem to forget that they owe their reader-passengers a destination. Not so Scottish Neil (Behold Thy Daughter) Paterson, a canny navigator with some of Somerset Maugham's gift for piloting a narrative to home port. The China Run, eight stories long, boasts several twist-of-fate tales that are polished and sardonic enough to have been told by the Old Party himself.

In the title story, Author Paterson's narrator potters about in a house full of 19th Century oil paintings and sailing-ship logs. He pieces together the faded fragments of how a gingery Scots lass, "imperious as any queen," commanded a clipper ship a hundred years ago and won little but disdain for her courage. In another story, a stranger in a bar tells a writer about a Spanish matador whose wife's treachery and infidelity drove him out of the bull ring and into exile. Those sufficiently versed in trick endings may arrive at the conclusion before the author does: the talkative stranger is the matador himself, and the unfaithful wife is the "senorita" the writer has just made a date with. The best story in the book has a winning, straightforward charm; two little Scots boys, forbidden a "dawg," kidnap and care for a "babby" instead.

Occasionally, Author Paterson drives a weak narrative to the verge of collapse. An account of a heavyweight prizefighter whose devotion to a pet lion leads him to kill a man finds the author himself fighting out of his class and losing the decision on pointlessness. Too talky for his stories' good, Paterson packs small emotional wallop. But at his best he can tell a fresh tale with few frills and no assist from his analyst's corner.

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