Back in the World

By Tobias Wolff

Bantam; 221 pages; $7.95.

I am Having an Adventure

By Perri Klass

G.P. Putnam's Sons; 253 pages; $17.95.

Drunk with Love

By Ellen Gilchrist

Little, Brown & Co.; 239 pages; $15.95.

NOBODY CAN DENY that great novels are a dime a dozen in Latin America.

Credo: there are real problems in Latin America--war, hunger, anarchy and Catholicism. The novel is an expansive, flexible literary form. It can mimic the diffuse, confusing format of a world run amok.

In industrial societies like the U.S., however, the problems are less spectacular. In our society there's more leisure for introspection. Too much introspection leads to boredom and boredom makes people go crazy, as a character from Tobias Wolff's short story collection, Back in the World, implies as he speaks about his experiences in Vietnam:

"Everything was clear," he said. "You learned what you had to know and you forgot the rest. All this chicken shit...You didn't spend every living minute of the day thinking about your own sorry-ass little self. Am I getting laid enough. What's wrong with my kid. Should I insulate the fucking house. That's what does it to you, Porchoff. Thinking about yourself. That's what kills you in the end."

Recent short stories in America are chronicling the American malaise of boredom. In much the same way that Latin American writers have made the novel a symbol of the fantastic convolutions and discombobulations of their history, American short story writers choose their form to mimic the small problems that beset us. A novel about boredom would be boring.

A PRESS release on the collection of short stories by Perri Klass '79, I am Having an Adventure, says that Klass--a 1986 graduate of Harvard Medical School, a columnist for Discover and the mother of a two-year-old--"has discovered that writing short stories fits nicely around the edges of her life."