In “The Women on the Wall,” an introspective California scholar watches a group of World War II service wives wait daily for mail from their men, imagining them some balanced reincarnation of Homeric heroines, until he hears and sees them too clearly to impose his smooth, academic patterns on their rough realities. As in Stegner’s novels, the sense of the past is always present, our own past, that of the characters, of humanity. Going back as early as 1938, various stories take us to the California coast, to western Canada, to New England, to Utah or elsewhere, and pull us just as compellingly into their historic niches and the lives of their people. 525 pages, $21.95.) In his introduction to this superb gathering of stories, Stegner remarks that his settings reflect his “tyrannous sense of place.” To readers of his novels and non-fiction, many of the places and Stegner’s power to evoke them are alike familiar. DEXTER WESTRUM Ottawa University Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner. Life, Harrison seems to be saying, has to be lived here and now, an admonition perhaps too dangerous to take seriously. We are not left with isolates contemplating their next move in a universe of infinite possibility.

These stories work toward resolution in human terms. Americans, it seems, can no longer imagine a West to grow to.

Reversing manifest destiny, Clare goes east to the Paris of her youth. Although his perceptions are shallow, he is not without heart. He has accepted the flow of capitalism without question and has ceased to be the human he once was. He is a man in America in the last gasp of the twentieth century. Harrison is excellent here: the husband is not a villain. She buries herself in the mud of an Iowa cornfield for a spiritual journey deep into the past and herself before emerging into a world lit by fireflies intent on salvagingwhat remains of her life. In the title novella, Clare, a middle-aged intellectual, faces the harshest of personal truths, understanding fully that the last person on earth who could be her best friend is her husband. Those who make it out alive briefly, if not cleanly, confront the promise they once imagined for their lives. Reviews 149 never given up his causes, from a Mexican prison. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Collected stories of wallace stegner