Women Not on the Verge of Feeling Very Much of Anything

I think I have overdosed on Lily Tuck, having read five of her six books recently: the National Book Award-winning novel The News From Paraguay, two earlier novels - Interviewing Matisse, or The Woman Who Died Standing Up and Siam, or the Woman Who Shot a Man-, her biography of Elsa Morante, Woman of Rome, and, now her 2002 collection of short stories, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived. Like the novels, the stories are about women who are buffeted by arrogant males and who feel not just dislocated (nowhere at home) but at least partly to blame for their psychic malaises.

The women are not prudish, but neither are they passionate. They have sex, but barely notice it, don't much participate in it. The disasters that recur do not include sex, but the female protagonists seem to have as little control over sex than over the (too frequent!) bolt-from-the-blue accidents that fell other characters.

Whether told in first- or third-person, Tuck writes elegant sentences with or of detachment of emotions (as of sex). Three of the stories in Limbo remind me that English is Tuck's third or fourth language (her parents were German Jews who fled first to Paris, where she was born; then her father went to Morocco and the Free French while she and her mother lived in Perú and Uruguay; I'm not sure whether she spoke German with her parents). She has recalled that when she arrived in the United States she was determined not to open her mouth until she could speak a ''perfect and accentless English sentence.'' She did and continues to craft sentences.

The experience of being nowhere at home is the prototypical modern one, and Tuck's stories often show women in settings that are alien to them, which provides occasions for describing ruins of Angkor Thom (and the great temple of Angkor Wat before mass tourism there), the canals of Bangkok, Thai royal history and Thai words and sentences, a French farmhouse, the ground-zero Nagasaki museum, the courtyard of the house in Lima her mother rented, Donner Pass (and history) etc. I sometimes wonder (particularly in the Thai language lessons in Siam and explication of for whom 'Rue Guynemer" is named) if the exotic color is padding, but usually convince myself that it is showing how the character is seeing and learning about unfamiliar locales.

I have more difficulty convincing myself that the "acts of God" are not contrived. I tell myself that like Krzysztof Kieslowski or Tom Twyker movies, Tuck is showing that tiny decisions or reactions can have huge consequences (for instance, riding back to Rome with Alberto Moravia in ''L'Esprit de l'Escalier,'' the matter of inches by which an out-of-control car misses the newly married couple coming out of the church from their wedding in "Next of Kin," the story I like least in the collection).

The stories I like best are what appear to be the most autobiographical-seeming: '"Ouarzazate" (the desert outpost at which her father spent the ward) and "Limbo."

Only two of the stories (Hotter, La Mayonette) were first published in the New Yorker, but many have the unsatisfactory, inconclusive endings that I think are endemic in New Yorker stories. I don't think every story needs an epiphany or a moral or an ironic twist at the end, but I like them to end, not just stop. And if not a male lead, I'd like an occasional passionate female one rather than the variants on alienated ones diffident about everything (including refusing sex from one or another demanding male-with useless appendages and/or unmemorable penetrations).

Always and everywhere feeling in Limbo, closer to hell (the sexual needs of others, and not just men) than to heaven is the leitmotif and right there in the title. Within the limits of writing about women ranging from aloof to alienated, Tuck is a superb craftswoman, but I need to look elsewhere for nourishment-the more expansive linked fictions of Joan Silber, who was one of the "no-name" 2004 NBA fiction nominees for one, Andrew Sean Greer (whose Confessions of Max Tivoli would be my choice for best 2004 fiction and who at least should have been nominated for the NBA) for another.