FICTION

IN THE FORM OF A PERSON by Ann Pyne (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 240 pp.). According to Ann Pyne, in her rather terrifying collection of short stories, the rich are not so very different from you and me--they’re just more repressed. She is talking not about Hollywood nouveau riche but about families that have had real money, and real neuroses, for generations--families where Mom’s “couple” prepares the perfect summer meal for her daughter and a man who would seem to have been her lover, or at least a romantic interest at one point, or where a son and daughter sneak away from the big house and up to the cottage for an afternoon alone, while Mom quietly goes mad wondering where everyone, particularly her granddaughter Victoria, has gone. Pyne’s characters have denied their feelings for so long that they barely can recall having any. The only evidence of their inner turmoil is a fine, tight tension that seems to sap the very blood from their veins; Pyne is big on the physical ravages of age as an external manifestation of inner strife. “On the Great Lawn at Groton” starts off as a woman’s reflection on two boys she sees wrestling as she heads across the lawn to a cocktail party, until it implodes and becomes a harsh reflection on her deadened existence. Not for the faint of heart, unless you get some sort of perverse pleasure from being reminded that money, indeed, can’t buy you love.