AMERICAN WIVES

Dissatisfaction pervades the nine finely wrought stories of this debut collection, winner of the 2003 Iowa Short Fiction Award. If Helms's protagonists, who are mostly well-to-do women, were once meant to be happy and thought themselves capable of pleasure, when the reader meets them they are uniformly disenchanted, surviving only, it seems, because there is no better choice. Speaking of her college-age daughter, who has the folly to think her affair with a married man is different from any other, one protagonist speaks the worldview of all: "What I would tell Christina, if I could, is that life, taking its natural course, collects such dust and dirt and filth; why begin with it?" In "The Confines of Civilized Behavior," the protagonist wonders idly whether her husband is sleeping with her best friend or the family's German au pair; in "Collected Stories," Ella feels comfortably suffocated by her husband's extravagant love for her; in the title story, a military wife in Frankfurt has an awkward tryst with her German tutor. Helms's women neither embrace nor abandon their lives, but constantly tap the brakes or step aside. It is the author's contained, acerbic voice that gives her stories shape and direction. Some readers may find a dose of Helms the very definition of an anti-antidepressant, but many women will feel that she is singularly gifted in telling it the way, alas, it is. Her map of emotional compromise is the more compelling because she shifts geographically from story to story, masterfully evoking place, peopling the landscape with fully realized minor characters. (Oct.)