Loving Wanda Beaver

In her second collection of short fiction, Baker (How I Came West, and Why I Stayed) crafts peculiar, improbably winsome tales--six stories and one novella--about disorderly lives. Although she never presumes to resolve her principals' futures, the author is an optimist; her stories generally end when a character finds peace. As in real life, true epiphanies are rare. Yet the remarkable title story features a transcendent resolution romantic enough to merit a sigh: Oleander Joy spends her summers detasseling corn and imagining a cozy domestic life with her crew boss, Wanda Beaver, but she can't gather the courage to approach her. During the off-season, Oleander dreams of her crush and works at the improbably named ``Institute for the Study of American Sexual Appetite,'' where she embodies the commonplace human desire--and dread--of attaining a longtime wish. Baker's other tales aren't quite as unusual as the title story, but most share its climate of fearful expectancy. ``Ooh, Baby, Baby'' and the novella, ``Almost Home,'' concern divorced men whose animal companions are far more reliable than humans; ``The Third Person'' introduces a middle-aged lesbian couple, one of whom is trying to downplay her terror of her inoperable cancer; ``Convocation'' describes a doting mother's sweet but frustrated attempts to console her manic-depressive daughter. Such cheerless scenarios, however, belie Baker's sensitive, bittersweet humor, and the roundabout way that her characters come to accept life's setbacks. (Sept.)