T A B L E+T A L K Discuss Irish literature from "Dubliners" to "Angela's Ashes" in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The Knife Thrower By Steven Millhauser Fiction (06/05/98) Philistines at the Hedgerow By Steven Gaines Nonfiction (06/04/98) Gary Cooper By Jeffrey Meyers Nonfiction (06/03/98) Meditations from a Movable Chair By Andre Dubus Nonfiction (06/02/98) Be Sweet By Roy Blount Jr. Nonfiction (06/01/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer F E A T U R E Punch drunk By Vivian Gornick Norman Mailer's collected essays reveal the sad legacy of a writer who couldn't stop fighting (05/27/98)		final vinyl days | and other stories BY JILL MCCORKLE ALGONQUIN BOOKS FICTION 224 PAGES BY MEGAN HARLAN | Though you can't judge a book by its cover, sometimes you can be duly warned by one. What to think of a short story collection whose jacket copy boasts of the author: "She goes right ahead and 'wastes' wonderful ideas, characters, plot twists, and resolutions on her stories when she might have stuck them away in a desk drawer to save for a bigger project, like a novel." The notion that short story characters and ideas -- if fattened up sufficiently, or left to rise like dough in some quiet corner -- can achieve novelworthy status is common in some publishing business circles. It's also fairly silly, suggesting that short stories are novels-in-training-wheels by writers too busy, inexperienced or lazy to go the 300-page distance. Unfortunately, the jacket blurb does point to a particular weakness in Jill McCorkle's second collection of short stories. These nine tales do, in fact, feel like character sketches for novels-in-progress. Often, they apply a singular, high-concept twist to a plot too undeveloped to withstand yanking. Even more disappointing, the voice that is so enjoyable in McCorkle's novels -- a richly Southern, kaffeeklatsch drawl given to labyrinthine family histories and narrative-as-witty-gossip -- here sounds rushed and a little tinny (though often capable of great hilarity). Take the title story, set in 1984 -- the cusp of the CD revolution -- in which a Motown-loving boomer guy who gave up a promising academic career to work in a record store worries about his future, sleeps with some women and ends up pretty much where he started off: incapable of liking Duran Duran, and OK with that. There's "Your Husband Is Cheating on Us," a cloyingly you-go-girlsy, Olivia Goldsmith-worthy rant by an "other woman" to her lover's wife, after discovering that "Mr. Big" has been cheating on them both -- with, natch, a Blockbuster-working, thigh-high boot-wearing bimbo. In the most accomplished story, "Paradise," two characters named (groan) Adam and Eve fall in love after meeting at a sprawling Southern wedding. While Adam is a Northerner who has avoided serious relationships since his parents' ugly divorce, and Eve a Southern belle who escaped small-town vistas for Atlanta, their vague conversations and personas strike no discernible spark. As protagonists in a fable about temptation, McCorkle's Adam and Eve fulfill their functions; but as people, they would be hard to pick out of a crowd. McCorkle's prose is full of sharp, snappy moments about men and women. (Here she is on a bachelor party: "Their women smirked with what was supposed to be great wisdom about these 'boys will be boys' moments. It was as if these women had opened the cage doors and allowed their guys a little recess"). And to her credit, in nearly every story here you do want more: more character, more breadth, more background. But diatribes about the short story as a distinct literary form aside, McCorkle's material does feel somewhat wasted on these cute but shallow vignettes. SALON | June 8, 1998 Megan Harlan lives in New York City.