Eye of a Hurricane: Stories — Ruthann Robson

The self-conscious, egregiously mannered prose of this short-story debut obscures the author's message and weakens her authority; little emotional substance emerges from the visual gloss of the writing. Robson addresses such weighty issues as lesbianism, feminism, single parenthood by choice, terminal illness and the incorporation of art into life, but an affected style reduces the 13 stories to the level of adolescent journal entries. Her characters and their dilemmas seem mere names and details without context or import. ``Artichoke Hearts'' shows Robson at her most unrestrained: these vignettes, with detail piled on unnecessary detail, add nothing to the collection and reveal only that the author has an indulgent imagination when it comes to food. She manages to relax the sensory overload and allow a glimmer of character depth to surface in ``Paternity,'' a story about a single woman with three children fathered by three different men, but this isn't enough to rescue the book from modernist archness. (Nov.)