For Frank Conroy release from the feeling that life has no center and yet one's home life must be protected at all costs comes from the act of stopping time by writing Stop-time, and from remembering the series of children's games that reson ate throughout the book. Frank Conroy’s memoir Stop Time is supposedly a coming of age story about fitting into the American male canon. It’s a recollection of Conroy’s life marbled with events that, in some cases, shock the reader with how revealing the novel is.

Midair

By Frank Conroy

Dutton, 149 pages, $15.95

Almost 18 years have elapsed since Frank Conroy published his extraordinary autobiography, 'Stop-time,' which enjoyed considerable commercial and critical success. Conroy`s new book, a slender collection of eight stories entitled 'Midair,' will inevitably be compared to his autobiography. Just as inevitably, that comparison will be damaging, for Conroy has produced nowhere near as fine a book.

'Stop-time' told of Conroy`s youth with humor and at times an almost unbelievable candor. He lived an unruly, romping boyhood: running free in the woods of Florida, mastering tricks with the yo-yo, skipping school, running away from home. Conroy`s natural father, a former literary agent and neurotic who died of brain cancer at the age of 40, did not live with the family but rather in various 'rest' homes--a sad, fate that had a telling effect on Conroy. His home life was an odd, fractured sort of existence filled with boredom and family squabbling. At the point where 'Stop-time' ended, Conroy`s sister, Alison, had had a breakdown, and he himself had just squeaked his way into a respectable college.

One naturally wondered, then, what these new stories would reveal.

'Midair,' the opening story in the collection, begins by striking a distinctly autobiographical note. The year is 1942. Sean Kennedy, age 6

Body And Soul Frank Conroy

(Conroy, too, was born in 1936), is picked up from school one day by his father, who has been away at a rest home. Sean, his sister, and their father then break into the family apartment by climbing onto the roof and down the fire escape, entering through the kitchen window. In the rest of the story, Conroy knits together scenes from more than 40 years of Sean`s life and marvels at their delicate interconnection, at the way they have come together across time. As fiction, 'Midair' succeeds only modestly. Its merits lie mostly in the autobiographical details it provides and in its accomplished prose.

A thin, insubstantial quality characterizes the other stories. 'Roses'

tells of an artist, an unregenerate womanizer, who has a spontaneous affair one morning with a bored but successful fashion model. 'Car Games' is no weightier. It is reminiscent of the prologue to 'Stop-time,' where Conroy described his driving at night through the streets of South London at 50 or 60 miles an hour, dead drunk, with the lights off. In 'Car Games,' a 35-year-old broker named Jack plays a dangerous game of tag in his Aston Martin, speeding down streets at 90 miles an hour, gently bumping a dark blue Chrysler driven by a woman who had cut him off. When, in 'Celestial Events,' a character begins talking with his deceased mother, one at last concludes that some of Conroy`s characters are just a touch crazy.

Several leitmotifs surface in these stories: the links across time between seemingly unrelated events; the almost supernatural intensity of some memories and experiences; the need for a writer to wait on inspiration; and the protectiveness and nearly inexpressible love of fathers for their sons. Often Conroy attempts in his stories not so much to narrate events as to dramatize states of feeling--the moods and emotions that color life.

That was his ambition in 'Stop-time,' too, but what one misses in these stories are the autobiography`s candor, fine humor and many stretches of brilliant writing. A book of rather humdrum stories might sound like a disappointment. Perhaps it would be in a lesser writer than Frank Conroy. But, even in low gear, Conroy makes pretty fair reading; besides, it is simply good to see him writing once again.

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