In the first story in John McGahern's Getting Through collection, a young woman who wants to write is obsessed by a Chekhov story called "Oysters." She keeps reconstructing it in her mind, altering it to her taste. As she sees it, an 8-year-old boy and his father are starving in the streets of Moscow, too refined to beg. The boy sees a sign in front of a restaurant that says, "oysters."

He asks his father what an oyster is. He has never heard of one. His father explains, and the boy imagines a frog sitting in a shell, starting out with great glittering eyes, its yellow throat moving. It squeals and bites at your lips as you eat it alive.

The boy is horrified by the idea of an oyster. Yet, in his hunger, his delirium, he cries, stretching out his hands in the street: "Oysters! Give me some oysters!"

Beautiful in itself, the image is also interesting for the way it establishes a pattern for some of the other stories in Getting Through. In these stories, the men are like that boy crying out for oysters, only they cry out for love. Love, too, lives in a shell and has great glittering eyes. It squeals and bites at your lips as you eat it alive.

The boy in the Chekhov story is given some oysters as a joke by two strange men. In his desperation, he even tries to eat the shell. In several of Mr. McGahern's stories, his characters try to eat the shell of love, too. They can't tell what is food and what is not.

When they are denied love, they are relieved. Not to have to taste the strangeness, to swallow the ambiguousness. Isn't the best part, they ask themselves, the crying out, the stretching of the arms, the hunger and the delirium? Hunger is energy, and lovelessness is freedom, "the very day in its suspension," as one character puts it.

In a story called "All Sorts of Impossible Things," a man proposes to a woman he has known for a long time because his hair is beginning to fall out. When she refuses him, he vows to wear a hat for the rest of his life. He will never bare his head again to love, to the sky, the sun or the wind.

Once in a while in Getting Through, love wins out against all odds. When it does, Mr. McGahern, writing about his native Ireland, knows exactly how to describe it. Here is a man looking at a woman who makes him happy for the moment:

She was not garlanded by farms or orchards, by a house by the sea, by neither judges nor philosophers. She stood as she was, belonging to the morning, as they both hoped to belong to the evening.

In "The Wine Breath," the lover is a priest, and so the love takes different forms. The priest loves a man who died 30 years ago. It is not a sexual love, but a love for what the man represented, for the world he moved through, a world of familiar sentiments and open fields and the mass still in Latin.

"It was as if the world of the dead," the priest thinks, "was as available to him as the world of the living." He reflects that "he would be glad of a ghost tonight," to relieve his haunting of himself. In a fine image, he expresses his sense of dislocation:

Sometimes he saw himself as an old man that boys were helping down to the shore, restraining the tension of their need to laugh as they pointed out a rock in the cast he seemed about to stumble over, and then they had to lift their eyes and smile apologetically to the passersby while he stood starting out to sea.

In "Swallows," a young state surveyor drives out in the rain to examine the scene of an accident with a police sergeant. They go back for a bite to eat at the sergeant's cottage, and noticing a violin in the surveyor's car, the sergeant asks him to play. The surveyor plays a theme from Paganini. When he drives out into the rain again, the sergeant is left in his shabby, isolated cottage with the sound of Paganini, the idea of Paganini, the remoteness and the nearness of him.

In "The Gold Watch," a young man gives his father a watch in a complex gesture of ambivalence. He knows that his father hates being given things: he never wanted to be given a son. The young man looks on with grim satisfaction as his father breaks rocks with a sledge, trying to destroy the watch on his wrist, and then plunges his arm into a barrel of water. The father wishes to destroy not only the gift, but the idea of time as well, time which has made him old, which has made him a father.

Some of the stories in Getting Through don't quite get through. They wander to a stop in inscrutable epiphanies, like a wandering into a cul-de-sac. Mr. McGahern's culde-sacs, though, tend to have gardens. It is also possible that the meaning of some of these stories lies in the search for meaning, a puzzled staring all around. The condition of perplexity may be our most attractive aspect.