High-fidelity stories, and a bumpy new novel

"Talking About It" by Tim Parks; Hesperus Press/Trafalgar Square ($24.95)

"Rapids" by Tim Parks; Arcade ($24)

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Tim Parks has grown so prolific that it seems to be difficult for American publishers to keep up with him. In his native Britain, he published three books in 2005 alone. Here we have two of them: a brilliant short-story collection and a lively novel about whitewater kayaking. (His other 2005 book, "Medici Money," appeared here last year.)

"Talking About It" gathers 14 feisty stories, some dating back to the late 1980s. One surprise about them is how consistent they are in style. Anyone who's read Parks' novels knows that with his 1997 Man Booker Prize-nominated "Europa" he made a quantum leap from sharp, shrewd, satirical clarity into a fiction that was denser, more harrowing and more wildly exhilarating, both in subject matter and technique.

The stories in "Talking About It" harken back to Parks' earlier, tamer style, but are so tasty and taut that they have a pop-fizz dazzle all their own. They mostly concern deception, betrayal and adultery, adultery, adultery. In the final tale (tellingly titled "After All I Gave up for Him!"), one character dryly comments, "After a while you just wish everybody was boringly monogamous."

But then there wouldn't be a story to tell.

Continual adultery could get monotonous - but what about competitive adultery?

That's what's going on in the book's title story, in which two squash partners - one a mild-mannered office executive, the other more swaggering - start swapping tales of their contemplated marital infidelities. As their intimacy deepens, reported bedroom moves start taking on the characteristics of squash-court maneuvers, and mutual confidences take on an unexpected homoerotic cast.

Mild-mannered Michael grows especially uncomfortable when brazen George's need to recount his erotic experiences begins to seem "as great as, if not greater than, the desire that had presumably inspired them in the first place."

In "The Room," adulterous affairs also take a surprise twist. Two women, one 21 years old, the other 41, accidentally meet in a room that their lovers have rented, splitting the costs so as discreetly to conduct their extramarital affairs. The showdown between the women over what they think they're doing is so all-absorbing that you're scarcely prepared for the moment when Parks reveals what's really going on in this love nest.

More polymorphous desires are explored in "Annette and Frank," in which a newly widowed older man finds himself falling for two newlyweds, and in "Globetrotters," in which a married couple find themselves saddled with an eccentric, gift-giving bachelor who refuses to become detached from them.

The trust and distrust surrounding real-estate dealings furnish the ingredients of "Changing Address" and "The Old House." Long-distance love works out better than actual cohabitation in the impeccably crafted "Keeping Distance." And a family's entire history - marriage, career, psychic scars - is nicely nailed in less than three pages in "Dives."

"Rapids," the new novel, is an odd bird - an interesting idea that's not quite convincing and a bit erratic in execution.

An English kayaking group goes to the Italian Alps for a whitewater experience, where their English guide Clive and his Italian girlfriend Michela give them their money's worth - and more. But Clive isn't just a kayaking guide. He's also a committed activist (anti-globalism, anti-global warming) who sees the tours he conducts and the protests he attends as "part of the same campaign ... to help people respect the world before it's too late."

After a near-catastrophe occurs on one river outing, Clive vanishes and one of the English group - 50-year-old Vince, a recently widowed banking executive drawn to dangerous waters - stays behind to look after Michela (and possibly sabotage his own career).

There's some stunning description of the ways in which, from a kayaker's point of view, "the river can be unlocked." But Vince's progress from neophyte to daredevil in less than a week is difficult to buy; Clive's contradictions aren't satisfactorily probed; and Parks' distracting shifts between present and past tense, often within a single sentence, serve little discernible purpose.

Luckily there's already a new Parks novel to look forward to: "Cleaver," out now in Britain, and a return, Parks says on his Web site, "to the more intense styles of Europa' andDestiny.'"

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(c) 2006, The Seattle Times. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.