THE QUIET WORLD of the Catholic clergy in middle America is not one that comes frequently under literary scrutiny. Nonetheless, J.F. Powers in his new collection of short stories, Look How the Fish Live, has taken the risk of focusing on pastors and curates. Although it's sometimes a little difficult to identify with his characters--how many of us are curates, after all?--the clergy and the Church are perfectly suited to the theme that runs through Power's stories. Powers's main concern is the lack of defined relationships in a world of change and ever-increasing technology and the Church's structured hierarchy is an ideal sphere for examining the breakdown of traditional relationships.

All of Powers's major characters want to return to a less confusing society, where an omnipotent God sees even little sparrows fall and curates always look up to their pastors. The tension between an ideal stability and the actual flux of human relationships is brought out in small ways: the young father in the title story who wants to show his children the balance in nature, and to believe in it himself, but who can't find a really satisfactory explanation for a baby bird's death; the pastor who has waited years to get a curate of his own, but who is so intimidated by the young man when he arrives that he can't manage to discover the curate's last name.

The stories contain little drama; the characters' search, and their eventual despair, is all quiet, internal. The Bishop of Ostergothenburg (Minnesota), who believes firmly in the hierarchy of authority but whose position is usurped by a cold, efficient assistant, doesn't go out in a blaze of glory. He is sideswiped by a truck and merely stays a while in the hospital, "doing fairly well for a man of his age, he understood, until he took a turn for the worse." And that's all. It is the understatement in these stories that make Powers such a master of his chosen topic: the clergy who lead quiet lives. Powers would be unfaithful to them if he presented their lives as action-packed.

Part of the understatement lies in the humanity of Powers's characters. His pastors are mild gamblers, they smoke cigars and drink whiskey now and then, they are concerned with worldly things like income, furniture and football games. Their need for defined relationships is presented as a human one rather than an institutional one, and because of this presentation the stories gain dramatic force. But the offices of the Church are no longer sacrosanct. As a result, the traditional hierarchy has been permanently weakened. Even God is brough down to a mundane level. When the Bishop of Ostergothenburg tries to retrieve his authority, he investigates behind the new bishop's back reports of a miraculous visitation--but the divine message is only "Keep Minnesota Green." The Bishop, shocked, can only respond with a prayer. God is no longer universal--the rest of the country, the rest of the world, is no longer within his vision. The Church has not disintegrated--the pastors and curates continue to help parishioners and serve the Mass--but a hairline crack has developed in the structure. In another story, a new cathedral is built without keystones in the arches, because the architects want a "light and airy feeling"--the keystone, symbol of the timelessness and stability of the Church, is gone. The structure remains, but the well-defined relationships of a society are missing.

Tucked in among the stories about the Church are several secular ones, which underline the confusion in the modern world. A three-page story that most clearly reveals Powers's disenchantment with modern society opens with a short clipping from a magazine, part of a first-person account of wifeswapping. A Christmas letter from one of the couples to the other follows, but where you expect at least some mention of the intimate experience that the four shared, you find only the details of the lawnmower they owned in common before one couple moved away (each couple owned $44 worth of it). Even marriage, Powers seems to say, is reduced to a financial relationship. Nothing is sacred, nothing is secure.

Look How the Fish Live ends with "Tinkers," the story closest to most readers's experience and thus, the most moving. Like "Look How the Fish Live," "Tinkers" is about a father's inability to provide his family with any measure of security; and, like the father in the title story, the father in "Tinkers" eventually gives up trying to do so. "America's thriftiest living author," he arrives in Ireland with his wife and five children, looking for a place to settle for a while. Mama and Daddy began "their career as tenants and travellers" 15 years earlier "when they'd surrendered their house in the woods, the first and last place they'd ever owned, to the faceless men of the highway department for a service road, and a few years later, when they'd surrendered the beautiful old place, the oldest house in the town, to the faceless men of the department of education for a parking lot (now occupied) by a faceless building), there had been acrimony, arguments about the nature of progress, between usurpers and usurpees. This time, no." By now, Daddy is resigned to constant change, to being part of a "mobile family." Even though he is homesick for America, and his family wants a secure home, they will not settle down. All the Daddy-author can do is try to live with the latest of a series of rented houses in a strange environment, where the only good thing he can find about the new house is that it won't need painting for five years.

IT IS THIS DESPAIR that makes Look How the Fish Live so powerful. When every story leaves the reader feeling empty and bemused, it's hard to go on to read the next. Powers offers very little hope--the major character of each story slips quietly into resignation, accepting a society that negates faith and community. One of Powers's pastors, who tries hard to gain the acceptance of his curate and his (curate's) friends, holds forth as he feels a true father would. He fails to establish any kind of relationship, but in the course of his attempt he realizes, "All this talk of community, communicating, and so on--it was just whistling in the dark." The old ways of relating to people have failed--the Church is changing, homes are no longer secure, and God's only message is "Keep Minnesota Green."

Powers suggests no way to escape the faceless men of the highway department. At the end of "Look How the Fish Live," when the young father has decided that survival of the fittest is indeed the rule of life, unethical as he finds it--all he can do is "accept his God-given limitations" and give up. Powers's bleak vision offers no hope. The traditional relations of the hierarchy are gone, and the only response left for the reader is a quiet desperation.