Mesmerizing tales of loss from down under

Already well known in his native Australia, Elliot Perlman came to the attention of American readers this year with his novel ''Seven Types of Ambiguity," named a New York Times Notable Book of 2005. With the publication of ''The Reasons I Won't Be Coming," Perlman's short fiction is available to the American public as well. The Australia depicted in these short stories is a landscape of loss: failed loves, wrecked careers, destroyed hopes, and ruined lives. The grade-school narrator of ''In the Time of the Dinosaur" describes the disintegration of his parents' marriage. In ''The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine" a lawyer recounts the events that cost him the woman he has loved for 14 years. In ''Your Niece's Speech Night," a middle-age businessman discovers that the co-worker he loves has been engineering his dismissal.

In terms of plot, not one of these stories is terribly original: The myriad ways in which we can lose our innocence, our lovers and our careers (or both), are variations on a limited number of themes. But Perlman's voices draw you in and hold you. At his best, he can create a narrator who takes you to the heart of desolation, as in the doubly betrayed narrator of ''Your Niece's Speech Night":

''Have I ever loved you? Yes, before there was reason, and still later, when there was none, even though . . . the best thing about us was the person I would have become had you been as I had cast you." Yet even this despairing soul is capable of engaging the reader with wry detachment as well, as when he recalls the events that led to his divorce: ''My marriage had ended not with a bang but with a Wiltshire, the now famous last argument concerning specifically a putative need for steak knives."

The order of the stories makes ''Reasons" a sort of literary sample tray, a gradual introduction to the full breadth of Perlman's talents. Many of the pieces, particularly the first three, are almost entirely monologues. But just when I had given up believing that Perlman could write from multiple viewpoints, I came to ''Manslaughter," a short story set during a murder trial in which the narrative masterfully glides through several perspectives: those of the witnesses, jurors, lawyers, and the bereaved. And at the end of the volume is the prize of this collection, ''A Tale in Two Cities," a novella that takes you from 1970s Moscow to 1990s Melbourne and is almost worth the price of the book by itself.

I felt I had reached my limit with stories of loss and hardship. But ''A Tale" mesmerized me with the horrors faced by the Gamarkins, a Jewish family that manages to escape the indignities of Brezhnev's Russia only to face the humiliations and poverty of life in Australia -- a country in which they speak the language badly and their professions are irrelevant. And Perlman deserves applause for the comic turns ''A Tale" takes in the person of Bernard Leibowitz, an antiques dealer turned private investigator whose conversations with Rose Gamarkin (his first client) contain some of the funniest dialogue I've read lately.

''Reasons" is far from flawless. Perlman often overwrites, and in some of the monologues I found myself wishing for a little more complexity, for moments when the reader learns more than the narrator would want. But the simple truth is that even when it's wanting, Perlman's work surpasses that of many writers at their best.