BOOKS: COMIC BEWILDERMENTS

Knowing when to say nothing is important," confides the female narrator of the nine short stories that make up Julie Hecht's Do the Windows Open? (Random House; 212 pages; $21). "And," she adds, "I haven't learned that."

This juxtaposition--what should be done set against the difficulty of actually doing it--underscores the comic principle that animates Hecht's first collection of fiction. Her narrator ought to be happy, or at least fulfilled. She and her architect husband have an apartment in Manhattan, a house in East Hampton and a summer rental on Nantucket. She can afford a small army of expensive people--psychiatrists, opticians, periodontists, endodontists, exercise trainers, floor renovators--to minister to her and her possessions' needs. Yet in spite of all this--or perhaps because of it--she is a psychological wreck.

But not, unlike so many contemporary fictional neurotics, unpleasant to be around. She never wallows in self-pity; she wallows, instead, in deracinated compassion for everyone, including herself, who must cope with contemporary reality. "People were lucky to have lived in bygone eras, I thought, even though they're dead now."

She is helplessly fascinated and regularly appalled by the physical appearance of things. There is, for instance, the "hideous" building in Manhattan where her husband works. "When you see this building you can think only one thing. 'WHY?' is the thing. 'Why? Why? Why?'" A Nantucket neighbor's exercise pants elicit the same befuddlement: "Why wear anything like that on these hot summer days, or any day?"

Paradoxically, she dabbles earnestly in photography, recording those surfaces that bewilder her so. She dreams of photographing Thoreau's Walden Pond and perhaps capturing a view of New England when "the world of ideas" still existed. Most of all, she wants to take a definitive picture of "the world-renowned reproductive surgeon Dr. Arnold Loquesto, whom I'd consulted and photographed" posing with his dog. Why? Because, with such a picture, "I would have the answer to the question of how to live in the world."

Her repeated, obsessive references to her reproductive surgeon betray the narrator's deepest concern without, apparently, her being aware of the disclosure. Whatever Dr. Loquesto was supposed to do for her somehow did not work, in a way she doesn't explain. She is 40 and childless, and Hecht has subtly grounded all these remarkably funny and engaging stories in the fundamental sadness of mortality.

--By Paul Gray