Short Takes

Gallatin Canyon
By Thomas McGuane
Knopf, 219 pp., $24

Thomas McGuane, in addition to being a superb prose stylist, is an intriguing hybrid. Much of his fiction is set in the Big Sky country of grim macho sentimentality. But his sensibility is as wry as the driest of urban literary martinis.

Time and again in this striking short story collection, a male protagonist finds his expectations cracking up against the canyon wall of contradiction. Easterners returning to their western roots are bent if not outright broken not by the land but by a human environment as inscrutable as it is arbitrarily hostile. In the title fiction, a relationship unravels on a road trip from Montana to Idaho fraught with unanticipated challenges. McGuane is by no means at home only where the buffalo roam. In ``Miracle Boy," set in the distinctly small sky environs of coastal Rhode Island, an extended family gathers to weather a sad event together and generally drive one another crazy.

Throughout we are in the hands of a master craftsman. ``The white borders of the screen door were incandescent with mountain summer," writes McGuane, reaching into some incorporeal dimension to evoke August in Montana. These stories move to the beat of illusions shattering, but the grandest illusions are the ones he paints on the blank canvas of the page.

Grayson
By Lynne Cox
Knopf, 147 pp., $16.95

Somewhere in the often self-dramatizing literature of close encounters there is room for an account as modest and charming as this one by Lynne Cox, author of the memoir ``Swimming to Antarctica."

One early morning many years ago, Cox, then a teenage long-distance swimmer, was training in the chilly waters off Seal Beach, Calif . Suddenly she felt a disturbance of a kind she had never experienced before. The ocean seemed ``charged with energy," ``expectant." The water beneath her shifted, then began to drag her down. Frightened, she raced toward shore, till an old beachcomber waved her off. You can't come in, he shouted. ``There's a baby whale following you."

Amazingly, her new playmate materialized, an 18-foot-long infant whose game of hide-and-seek with the girl had separated him from his mother. As people called advice from shore, Cox reveled in her privileged moment of mystical communion. Then, though cold and tired, she courageously turned out to sea, hoping against hope to lead the lost boy home, an extraordinary adventure artfully retold with all the joy, wonder, and suspense it deserves.

The Natural Disorder of Things
By Andrea Canobbio
Translated, from the Italian, by Abigail Asher
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 260 pp., $25

Claudio Fratta, the eccentric Italian landscape designer who narrates this eccentric Italian novel, sees his craft not as ordering nature but as succumbing gracefully to, in the words of the title, ``the natural disorder of things."

And in fact we meet Claudio at a particularly disorderly moment in his life. A bachelor in his 40s, he fusses over his young nephews to make amends for the domestic upheaval created by his philandering brother. His widowed mother is disgusted with him for having failed to save another brother, a drug addict, and for failing as well to use the pistol she has absurdly pressed upon him to punish the loan shark who ruined his father. Finally, Claudio has become obsessed to the point of stalking a woman he rescued from a suspicious hit-and-run incident, only to find that she is the wife of a prospective client.

Reminiscent of Hitchcock, had Hitchcock possessed a wistful streak, the novel transplants the noir genre to the sun-baked Italian countryside with interesting results, once Claudio realizes that he has at his disposal a weapon as deadly as the hand-me-down gun he doesn't want to use -- his lethal passivity.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. See ``Bookings," Page D6, for information on a local appearance by Lynne Cox.