IN THE ABSENCE OF ANGELS

A collection of short stories, some from The New Yorker and with appearances in yearly collections, has, in its selections, a basic theme of moments of loneliness, of rejections and the rejected, which are for the most part Jewish in origin. There is a well turned modern witch story an alcoholic mother and a tense gathering Greenwich There Are Many several school scenes and a department story setting, the companionship of a bar, marital discord, and a group of Jewish family incidents. There's a sedulously whetted prose style here, and a feeling of burnished worldliness which underlines the intensity of naked isolation and the probing of antagonisms, whether adult and juvenile or race and creed Caviare.