FICTION

LEAH, NEW HAMPSHIRE: The Collected Stories of Thomas Williams by Thomas Williams (William Morrow: $22; 320 pp.). Some fiction telegraphs its age without the usual markers--references to historical events, cars, fashions, consumer products. That’s the case with the late Thomas Williams’ collection of stories, most of which were initially published in the New Yorker, Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post between 1957 and 1966; there’s a moral certainty to the prose, a hardness and precision. The similarities between Williams’ prose and Hemingway’s are conspicuous. Not only do many of the stories concern fishing and hunting, they also bear names like “The Survivors,” “Goose Pond,” and “The Snows of Minnesota”--though many of Williams’ characters are tight-lipped New Englanders with much less to prove to the world. Japhet, in “The Skier’s Progress,” wants little more than his health back, so he can try out his new, purely functional ski gear. In “Ancient Furies” an English professor finds himself so far out of the practice of life, of ordinary communication with his wife and son, that he is increasingly unable to distinguish the real from the unreal. The best stories here--”The Snows of Minnesota” and “The Fisherman Who Got Away,” to name two--are nicely crafted reflections on identity and solitude, but as a group the stories feel somewhat dated. John Irving, in his introduction, calls Williams “a wonderfully old-fashioned writer,” and that description, for better and worse, is on target.