Fortune Telling

Lynn delivers dry, credible sketches of small psychological turning points in the 14 stories of his first collection. Even when the action includes a fight and a death (""Hard Feelings""), Lynn's feelers are out for changes in sentiment rather than action, and he prefers stories that take their angle of vision as seriously as what they see. In ""Play,"" for instance, Lynn takes a third party's point of view in order to show how a typical instance of school bullying meshes with larger social forces. A gifted black kid caught in a declining school system, James Russell watches bullies pick on his sometime playmate, biracial Stevie Peters. When James tries to protect Stevie, an aging, bitter white teacher thwarts his reluctant sense of justice. Lynn has an instinct for the tentativeness of male adolescence. A narrator aware of his own sentimentality brings unexpected pathos to ""When the Time Is Right,"" a clich -risking tale about a promising high school athlete struck down in his prime. For all his strengths, though, Lynn has yet to find the transfiguring theme that could turn these sketches into something more lasting. His one attempt to make such a statement, ""Recollections,"" about a writer's unhappy reunion with a love from his youth and the writerly exploitation that poisoned their affair, never quite convinces with its pat self-laceration and awkward reach for the elegiac. Yet it's likely that in the future Lynn will put his considerable talents to some more memorable use. (July)