[In the generally positive review of The Infinite Passion of Expectation below, Milton praises Berriault's focus on characters who are "caught in emotional ambiguities and contradictions," but calls the stories in the collection "oddly cerebral. "]

Gina Berriault has been writing novels and short stories for some 25 years. And the 25 stories collected in The Infinite Passion of Expectation are without exception nearly flawless miniatures in her particular mode. They always descend below the surface of the events and phenomena out of which they are woven, but they descend only minimally, so that their observations stay easily within the perceptions of the characters and the reader is given the illusion not merely of looking at alien lives but of moving through alien sensibilities. In story after story, Mrs. Berriault focuses on lives that touch each other without intimacy. She magnifies the banal instances that are her fiction's raw material until we see a series of worlds in close-up, anatomies as simultaneously repellent and magnetic, exotic and familiar, as a Chuck Close portrait.

In particular she is a virtuoso in the sort of claustrophobia from which Jean-Paul Sartre built his play No Exit; the emotional climate, I mean, that develops when two or three characters with conflicting fears and expectations jostle against each other in a rather small space. In the book's title story a young woman with no money, no friends and no capacity for hope becomes the temporary housekeeper of an old man who is rich, optimistic and intellectually and sexually vital. With nothing before her except a long life, she locks herself away; for him, who has everything and wants more, existence is already receding. Their lives confront and contradict each other. In "The Mistress" a woman and the son of her former lover meet at a party and exchange clashing memories of a time that to her meant love and to him misery. In "Myra" a bride is still passionately in love with her young husband, who, already grown used to her, wants simply to take her for granted and be left alone.

The characters of these stories, almost without exception, are humble people caught in emotional ambiguities and contradictions that have paralyzed them and made it easier to live in dreams or the past than to confront the present world. Often, in fact, their longing for the past and their illusions about the future reduce them to shadows. The middle-aged woman who is the protagonist of "Bastille Day" drifts into a bar where the ghosts of her youthful rebellions and ideals lie in wait for her, as unrealized and disappointing as the great events enshrined in the celebration of July 14. Claudia in "Death of a Lesser Man" dreams of love and intellectual adventure, but the freedom that these imply seems quite as deadly to her as her role in the futile progress of a polite marriage. In "The Stone Boy" a child accidentally kills his brother and is so numbed by this catastrophe that he can only react to it as if nothing had happened. In "Nights in the Gardens of Spain" a guitar teacher finds momentary solace for the insufficiencies of his daily life, not in his own music or that of his students, but in a borrowed recording.

The rewards for most of Mrs. Berriault's people are, in fact, usually brief and borrowed and often illusory. A large part of her characters' existence is spent rear-ranging their expectations, adjusting what they see and feel to what they had hoped to see and feel, which was quite different. A son explores his contradictory responses to his father's mental illness; mothers and children walk a delicate tightrope between the child's ignorance and dependence and the adult's confused loyalties and responsibilities. The most poignant story of the collection and my favorite is "The Diary of K. W.," in which an old woman dying of starvation listens to the sounds of the happy life in the apartment above hers, too shy and too conditioned by isolation and self-denigration to ask for help.

Although most of these stories take place in or around San Francisco, the experiences they represent are amazing in their variety: from bar nights to discussions of Camus, from the routines of farm chores to the hand-tomouth improvisation of the urban ghetto. These are particular worlds drawn from the specific witness of the characters themselves.

And yet in some way difficult to describe, Mrs. Berriault's fiction remains oddly cerebral. Her characters' inner voices seem always to move toward generalization. "He was the parent who breaks down under the eyes of his child," the narrator of "The Bystander" says of his father, ". . . while the child stands and watches the end of the struggle and then walks away to catch a streetcar." That exquisite, aphoristic ending also seems disturbingly at odds with the gritty, down-at-heels realism of the story's characters and setting. The heroine of "Death of a Lesser Man" thinks about the man who has been following her and who she is afraid may attack her: "The obscene dolt must have stolen away her dream of herself in the future, the dream that was only a memory of herself in the past. . . . The intruder must have stolen away the past and the future." Surely an incredibly subtle insight for a woman who is both choked with fear and distressed by incongruous stirrings of sexual excitement.

In one of the longer stories in the collection, "The Search for J. Kruper," a lionized writer of autobiographical schlock heads into the Mexican wilderness to find his antithesis and idol, the great J. Kruper, who "forgot the self that bore a name and became all others." J. Kruper is, one assumes, Mrs. Berriault's own ideal of authorship, and the aim of her fiction, like his, is forgetting the self and becoming all others. But as the story wryly notes, the self is not easily forgotten and, far from obligingly becoming all others, often subverts all others to become the self instead.

In fact, it is hard to escape the author's voice in these stories: Their diction is sophisticated, their prose bristles with astute observation. An occasional witty quirk of syntax seems to grant control to the inanimate and the abstract: "She heard his breath take over for him and . . . carry on his life"; "The silence she ought to have kept overcame me." I suppose I may be quibbling over what is merely a shrewd exploitation of grammar to define human helplessness, but the mannerism adds to the sense that these pieces are more about the pattern of people's lives than about the people, that they develop less from the integral needs of their characters than from the ideas they have been created to contain.

The 25 stories of The Infinite Passion of Expectation are limited, then, by the control of their author's intellect. But within those limits they work brilliantly. None really moved me, none jarred my complacent prejudices or stirred my compassion; but there is not a story among them that is less than elegant, less than perfectly observed, perfectly resolved fiction.