RATTLEBONE by Maxine Clair (Penguin: $9.95;...

RATTLEBONE by Maxine Clair (Penguin: $9.95; 213 pp.). The 11 linked short stories in this collection capture African-American life in Rattlebone, a small town at the edge of Kansas City during the 1950s. Although Irene Wilson, the narrator of most of the stories, lives in a comfortable house, she sees the limits segregation places on her parents and friends. Clair’s unpretentious prose evokes the vanished, divided world of small town America, where “evening sighed its own relief in a locust hum that swelled from the cattails next to the cemetery. . . .�