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men giving MONEY, womenyelling BY ALICE MATTISON MORROW 244 PAGES FICTION BY JENNIFER HOWARD | Denny Ring is a lover, a thief, a go-between, a drug user, a pet cause; he'll take your money or your heart, depending on his mood. But what Denny does best is give the other characters in Alice Mattison's collection of linked stories, set in and around New Haven, Conn., something to react to. Daisy, a 40-ish community college professor, has an obsessive, illicit romance with him, though he's 20 years her junior. Her boyfriend, Pekko, a yogurt-store owner with a taste for lost causes, takes it as his personal mission to keep Denny out of trouble. Tom, an English major turned carpenter, gives Denny a lift one snowy night and almost doesn't live to regret it. And so on. Denny's not the only character who rotates through these stories: The narrator of one will pop up as the girlfriend, parent, brother or best friend in another. Characters develop in unexpected and oblique ways; you're inside someone's head in one story, then looking at them from a third person's point of view in the next. Family dynamics take four or five stories to develop. This does hold a reader's attention; each reappearance adds another piece to the puzzle of personalities, and you begin to look for favorites. (I took a shine to silly Tom and his robust girlfriend, Ida, a big blond with a sensible outlook and a turquoise tote.) Sometimes Mattison gets pointlessly clever with the linking, as when one story turns up as the plot of a piece of fiction written by a character in another story. Still, the structure of the book does make a larger point about the interconnectedness of lives -- even in a place as gritty as Mattison's New Haven, a town where working-class laundromats and seedy student rentals stand next to the comfier houses of a socially conscious, existentially challenged middle class. There's a price tag attached to middle-class status in Mattison's world; these teachers, social workers and intellectuals can't seem to stay emotionally afloat, no matter how much social work and family time they put in. Mattison's writing doesn't get fancy. She prefers a deceptive plainness punctuated occasionally by a moving moment, as when a derelict tells a soup kitchen volunteer about the luckiest day of his life: "It was hard to go to bed, because until he went to bed he was living in the same day with his luck, and leaving it was like leaving a room with a friend in it." But these moments arrive too rarely, and so too many of these stories fall flat and hollow, like footsteps on dry ground, leaving only faint impressions of themselves behind. Aug. 19, 1997 Jennifer Howard lives in Charlottesville, Va., where she is at work on a novel. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html