EMPEROR OF THE AIR Stories by...

EMPEROR OF THE AIR Stories by Ethan Canin (Harper & Row: $7.95)

This collection of short stories, Ethan Canin’s first, laudably runs counter to the current trend of minimalist prose by writers in the younger-than-30 set. His symbols, laden with relevance, are woven into the text, at times overburdening the narrative.

In the title story, a 69-year-old retired astronomy teacher refuses to cut down his 250-year-old elm tree, although it is infested with insects. When the narrator receives a note from his neighbor, Mr. Pike, that the city will do the cutting, he seeks revenge: He collects a bottle full of the offending pests, and crawls into his neighbor’s yard to share the infestation.

But, before he opens the jar, Mr. Pike and his son come into the yard. The father, assuming a tone of knowledge, is pointing out the constellations but inventing their names: the Mermaid’s Tail, Mount Olympus, the Emperor of the Air. Somehow this scene stirs a change in the astronomer-narrator.

Canin’s “epiphanies are first-rate,” Richard Eder wrote in these pages. “They are also everywhere. They do not transform the stories; they virtually are the stories.”