Emotional veracity is surely one of the most elusive elements in fiction. Just how do we decide that we trust a writer's voice? The sound of authentic feeling is different for each writer, and it cannot be easily parsed; and yet it is what determines whether we decide to put ourselves in an author's hands, or to balk at even the most brilliant insights or the most touching incidents or the most unexceptionable views. Andre Dubus is a writer whose work depends almost entirely on the persuasiveness of that sound. He consistently forgoes cleverness, formal rigor and any number of special effects. His note is a fragile one, and is sometimes too closely adjacent to the sentimental. And yet, when he hits it right, the cadences of that unverifiable but convincing truthfulness give his writing a simple and surprising power.

Mr. Dubus, who lives in Haverhill, Mass., is the author of a novel and six previous books of short fiction. He has been a quietly appreciated literary presence for over 20 years; his Selected Stories (most published elsewhere between 1975 and 1988) reminds us how much of a specific, unmistakable place he has come to carve out and occupy. Geographically, the fictional Dubus country is situated north of Boston, in the rural hamlets and unpresumptuous small towns of the Merrimack Valley. Spiritually, it is a place distinguished by its unvarnished and illuminated ordinariness.

We are accustomed, in today's fiction, to characters who are wretched, or disconnected, or down and out. But Mr. Dubus's people don't even have the glamour of poverty, or neurotic despair, or ennobling restlessness. Their occupations are of the near-invisible sort: they own ice-cream parlors or work as bartenders or waitresses, or are college students of the middling kind or college teachers of undefined tenure status. There tends to be something pre-postmodern in their indifference to worldly success, in their resistance to clocks and office regimen and schedules. ("She regarded [the clock] as … a conscience run on electricity," it is said of the protagonist in "The Pretty Girl," "and she was delighted, knowing that people had once lived in accord with the sun and weather, and that punctuality and times for work and food and notwork and sleep were later imposed upon them, as she felt now they were imposed upon her.") What matters to them most are not the temptations of upward mobility, but their dilemmas as wives and husbands and fathers and lovers.

It is in these usually hidden lives that Mr. Dubus finds his material—and his drama. For despite the unprepossessing privacy of his characters, a typical Dubus tale usually turns on, or builds toward, a highly dramatic, often violent situation: a father who vows revenge for his son's death and who achieves it, in its ambiguous sweetness, through murder ("Killings"); a young woman who has been raped by her husband and who is driven, eventually, to pull the trigger on him ("The Pretty Girl"); a woman who is having an affair with a former priest and who decides, as she prepares for his death from cancer, to end her open and false marriage ("Adultery").

But the immediate interest of these short stories and novellas resides not so much in the explosive premises and the detonating endings as in the concrete, sensuous detail, in the patient stitching of modest observation. Nothing is too humble for Mr. Dubus to notice, and his even, unjudging tone pays no heed to pretension, or to knowing snideness. People in these stories flip pancakes and dress in parkas in the morning, pour bourbon and worry about what young people are doing to themselves with drugs, and proffer and accept signs of affection without the benefit of irony or self-irony, or even self-consciousness.

Lacking stylishness or skepticism, or sharp wit, Mr. Dubus's people are endowed with a forbearing acceptance that comes close to both passivity and a kind of knowledge. They are allowed to live out their natures, and their fates. The protagonist of "The Fat Girl" lets herself, after a long interval of heroic thinness, go to fat again with a triumphant luxuriance, as if fat were her destiny. Others move along the trajectory of their longings toward grief or love or moments of vision with a hypnotic and unconflicted certainty.

Especially toward love. Now that one has an overview of two decades of his work, it is evident that love is at the center of Mr. Dubus's fictional morality, its presence the greatest virtue, its corruption the only sin.

The word "sin" is pertinent, for many of the characters in these stories are active Roman Catholics, and their belief in the redemptive powers of human love derives directly from their religious faith. In "Voices From the Moon," a priest has this to say to a 12-year-old boy who is trying to reconcile himself to the frightening discovery that his father is about to marry his older brother's former wife: "Think of love. They are two people who love each other, and as painful as it is for others, and even if it is wrong, it's still love, and that is always near the grace of God."

To speak about matters of sentiment with such unadorned forthrightness is to take considerable risks, and in its reaches of sympathy, as well as in its resolute plainness, Mr. Dubus's fiction has a certain daring. His range of characters is wide: young marines in basic training facing the first test of their endurance, and middle-aged family men who want to test themselves no more; young women trying to decipher their own hearts, and mothers who know the futility of trying to convey what they know to their sons. His protagonists are divided nearly equally between men and women, and despite the almost defiantly traditional views voiced in these stories on the matter of gender ("it was womanhood they were entering, the deep forest of it, and no matter how many women and men too are saying these days that there is little difference between us, the truth is that men find their way into that forest only on clearly marked trails, while women move about in it like birds"), Mr. Dubus has the courage to imagine women from within their subjectivity, and to do so with considerable understanding. He is not afraid to be utterly serious in his accounts of jealousy, or the pain of divorce, or filial attachment. He makes us feel the full force of family passions.

He is particularly fascinated by the love between fathers and daughters, and there are several such bonds in these stories which are almost disturbing in their intensity. In "A Father's Story," one of the most forceful and disconcerting tales in this collection, a father chooses to save his daughter by covering up her crime, and possibly colluding in the death of a young man she accidentally ran over. A believing Roman Catholic, toward the end of the story he confronts his God. "I could bear the pain of watching and knowing my sons' pain, could bear it with pride as they took the whip and nails. But You never had a daughter and, if You had, You could not have borne her passion."

"A Father's Story" has enough momentum and sheer fervor to stay this side of pathos; but Mr. Dubus does not always avoid the melodrama that is the natural defect of his virtues. The thin line he walks becomes particularly tricky when he is negotiating questions of sexuality. The sensibility of these stories is warmly physical and erotic, but he relies too much on scenes of people engaged in tender congress. He is too preoccupied with virginity. Sometimes he substitutes a conventional response for the more strenuous work of the imagination. In "Rose," a story about child abuse, the episodes are horrendous, but the language of suffering is almost entirely and conventionally pathetic. Indeed, too often in these stories there is a disjunction between the extremity of the situations and the persistently compassionate tone; it is as if instead of confronting the sometimes troubling conundrums he sets up (is it really all right to murder your son's murderer?), Mr. Dubus prefers to let them dissolve in the amniotic fluid of his empathy.

But in his more effective stories—and those, here, predominate by far—the light of Mr. Dubus's acceptance is a source of clarity and of strength. His voice neither aggrandizes nor belittles, but it accords even the most mundane gestures and objects their exact, just dignity. Really, what he gives us is an unastonished account of his characters' puzzlements and desires, and those small moments in which momentous movements of the heart happen. In the process, he recovers their largeness and significance. Mr. Dubus is a writer who works within a well-defined sphere of concerns. But if you're willing to listen to the nuances of his music, you'll find that, in his own register, he has near perfect pitch that can transfigure the commonplace.