Ordinary Life
By Elizabeth Berg
Random House, $24.95
ISBN 0679437460

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A new collection from Elizabeth Berg

Elizabeth Berg knows us too well. Female readers will see their dissatisfactions and hidden assumptions laid bare in characters like Mavis McPherson.

Mavis shuts herself in the bathroom to think when she finds herself suddenly older, suddenly 79. "It occurs to her that she thought she would always. . . oh, be thirty-two," Berg writes in the title story of Ordinary Life. "She would grow older, but she would be thirty-two."

Guess again, Mavis.

The 15 stories in this collection include some of the first fiction that Berg, a longtime nurse, ever wrote, as well as more recent stories. Like her best-selling novels (Pull of the Moon, Talk Before Sleep, Open House), they tend to be life-affirming, yet wry.

In a story called "Departure from Normal," a 36-year-old woman with breast cancer finally accepts life's randomness. "When a bad diagnosis comes, it is never how you think it will be, she tells people. . . . It is you, seasoning the pasta sauce and singing along with the radio. And then the phone rings and your doctor tells you he's gotten back some test results."

Nostalgia for a simpler time permeates many stories, even as Berg hints that there were no truly simple times. It only seemed that way from the perspective of a child growing up in the 1950s. In more than one story, the point of view is that of an adult looking back on such childhood memories.

Berg fans will sense some interplay between Ordinary Life and her previous novels. "Martin's Letter to Nan" gives the husband's response to the wife who ran away in The Pull of the Moon. The mother with Alzheimer's disease in "Caretaking" resembles another mother similarly afflicted in Until the Real Thing Comes Along.

Some tales seem too good to be true. A husband forgives his wife's adultery and tells her he realizes life has been hard for her. A thief leaves his victim unharmed, wearing a new diamond necklace.

A character in one story here says she likes being a nurse because you see people "when they are real." Berg's best stories mine such reality and offer likely, if not ideal, endings.

Anne Morris writes from Austin, Texas.