A FAINT UNEASINESS hangs over all Frederick Barthelme's short stories, a subtle, inescapable sense of skewed perspective Even reading snippets of his work at several-month intervals--the way most of it appeared in The New Yorker and Esquire--one detects the same imbalance over and over, a sort of ripple in the meticulous mirror-glass which the author holds up to picayune suburbia. Not that the impression dominates. Caught up in the smooth flow of Barthelme's prose, this reader has often dismissed it as a paranoid mirage. But now 17 of Barthelme's stories have been gathered into a book, and there can be no further question Frederick Barthelme has one big problem.

The difficulty may best be demonstrated by example. Of the 17 stories, no fewer than nine begin with a variation on the following scene. The narrator, always a 35-ish man with a nondescript name and nondescript job, often between marriages, is some where nondescript, actively pursuing passivity. While the T.V. chatters or the traffic light delays changing, a woman unexpectedly enters. She is physically striking, socially adept, completely confident of her welcome, and with minimal explanation she sweeps the narrator up in a sequence of events beyond his control. Sometimes there is sex, but not often, any moves in that direction the woman initiates and the narrator resists or ignores. More often than not, though, he winds up taking her out to dinner and generally going with the flow.

The opening of the title story, "Moon Deluxe," it typical.

You're stuck in traffic on the way home from work, counting blue cars, and when a blue metallic Jetta pulls along side, you count it--twenty-eight. You've seen the driver on the other evenings, she looks strikingly like a young man--big, with dark, almost red hair clipped tight around her head. Her clear fingernails move slowly, like gears, on the black steering wheel. She watches you, expressionless, for a long second, then deliberately opens her mouth and circles her lips with the wet tip of her tongue. You look away, then back Suddenly her lane moves ahead--two, three, four cars go by. You roll down the window and stick your head out, trying to see where she is, but she's gone.

Later, the narrator is enticed home by a second woman he meets at a party, who turns out to be the driver's roommate; they tease and seduce him, then hint at a lesbian menage, until he walks home alone. Virtually the same plotline follows the opening of "Pool Lights," which begins this way:

There are things that cannot be understood--things said at school, at the supermarket, or in this case by the pool of the Santa Rosa Apartments on a hazy afternoon in midsummer. A young woman wearing pleated white shorts and a thin gauze shirt open over her bikini top says, "You have a pretty face." Automatically, you smile and say, "Thank you," but, looking up at her, wonder why she selected that particular word, that adjective.

Occasionally the implied reaction to the intrusion proves less mild, less forgiving, in light of the events which unfold. "Monster Deal" ends in bitterness and anger when the female intruder all but kidnaps Karen, the teenage paper-delivery girl the narrator is attracted to; the two women go off laughingly together on Karen's Friday afternoon paper route and return dead drunk on Saturday morning, having obviated Karen's Friday night dinner date--the first--with the narrator. This story, too, begins familiarly:

Ten O' clock Friday morning I'm on the porch in the landlord's burgundy robe, smiling at a tall woman who has clear blue eyes and slightly curly light brown hair--She looks like an athlete. She might be thirty-five. Her fingernails are glistening and perfect in the morning light "I'm a friend of Elliot's Tina Graham--he didn't mention me?"

Elliot is the landlord. I tell her Elliot's out of the country till August, which is true.

"You must be Bergen, am I right?...Sorry to bust in on you like this," she says, closing the folder and stepping past me into the dark foyer. "Elliot was supposed to tell you about me. "She smiles as if we've settled something. "Maybe if we have some coffee I can explain--that a pretty robe you've got." She picks up the day-old newspaper.

IMAGES OF INTRUSION, vulnerability, forced entry, the rape theme lurking just beneath--what is all this? Frederick Barthelme is known as neither an ogre nor a psychotic, but a well-respected and well-connected fiction artist, his stories popular for their sharpness of scene and characterization, their control over accurate, endearing detail. The stories in Moon Deluxe are classic vignetes of Americana; shopping centers and brand names abound, dialogue is rendered with a perfect ear.

And yet the coincidence of openings is only the tip of a thematic iceberg. A sampling of plots from the eight stories not fitting that particular pattern reveal some of its contours:

*In "Grapette," a melancholy narrator in his late thirties is unwillingly reunited with Carmel Seaver, an ultra-precocious 17-year-old who slept with him when she was thirteen and he was thirty-three, and who drives him all over town in daddy's birthday present to her, a telephone equipped Peugeot.

*In "Safeway," the narrator pursues as far as coffee a dalliance with a beautiful married woman he meets in a Safeway supermarket, only to panic and given her a false apartment number for their intended rendezvous.

*In "Exotic Nile," the narrator is hoodwinked by his landlord into taking his wife's younger sister out to dinner because "She's young, but she's not that young, and she likes you." "[Did] You get him?" the girl asks her brother on reappearing and they all pile into her convertible, where she proceeds to climb all over the narrator.