Implosion of Memory and Fiction : A collection of prose epiphanies : RIVER TEETH: Stories and Writings, <i> By David James Duncan (Doubleday: $20; 259 pp.)</i>

River teeth are the roots that jut from a river bank after the rest of the tree has decayed and washed away. This is also the name David James Duncan gives to several of the prose epiphanies in his new collection. Part memoir and part prose poem, these personal tales are the obdurate remains of memory, flashes of the author’s history that are purged of everything but their most vivid and essential features. The expository introductions and conclusions that frame conventional memoirs are shorn from these tales; they concentrate instead on the core of a particular memory, the sharp emotion and surreal imagery that cause certain scenes to stick in the mind for years. To read “River Teeth” is to have a stranger’s recollections loom up out of vagary and namelessness, and to grip you as if they were your own.

“Red Coats” has the 3-year-old Duncan holding onto his mother’s coat during a Christmas shopping trip with his brothers and sister. Eventually, the boy begins to appreciate the whiplash thrill at the hem of the coat, which trolls him like “a half-drowned herring, through a crush of silhouettes along the shadowed side of a building.” No sooner does he abandon himself to the danger and delight of the ride than he notices, on the sunlit side of the crowded avenue, a doppelganger family led by his mother. When he tugs on the red coat to show his mother her twin, a strange woman turns to face him. “What did you do?” he bellows. This mother-by-default is as baffled as her new child, and they stand and appraise each other with nervous amazement. When the narrator is finally returned to his real mother, he is also restored to the realm of the familiar, but not without a pang of loss for the shadowy, unpredictable world he had just inhabited.

In “Rose Vegetables,” Portland’s Grand Floral Parade takes a grotesque turn when a Meadowland Dairy wagon, drawn by a team of black Clydesdales, runs over the head of a man walking beside the horses. The young Duncan and his family stood only feet away, and he experienced a sense of unreality “so complete that not even the sound of crunching skull or the widening pool of brain made me queasy. When easily 25 people, including my father, flopped to the ground as if playing Simon Says with the dead man, the unreality only thickened.” What the author learned a few minutes later, after his father recovered, was that he had not only witnessed a man’s death, but a mass faint. Still, it was the lack of coverage in either the newspapers or on television that left him with his most lasting impression: the haste and inauspiciousness with which so many are dispatched into the hereafter.

One reason Duncan, who wrote the novels “The River Why” and “The Brothers K,” succeeds in his odd genre is because he shies away from over-interpretation and refuses to wrap up each recollection with a big, allegorical bow. Paradoxically, it is the slightly unresolved nature of the form that makes the shorter pieces in “River Teeth” seem whole rather than merely anecdotal; they continue to resonate and beg questions long after the last sentence. Another reason is Duncan’s prose; these micro-memoirs offer, unfailingly, the rewards of extraordinary language.

Duncan’s book is a mongrel of sorts, a collection that also includes short stories and more traditional memoirs. Among the fable-like fictions, the most subtle and exquisite is “Her Idiots,” in which a fledgling shepherdess finds herself appalled by the eyes of her sheep: “Nothing had prepared her for such unspeakable non-intelligence. The eyes were hideous. . . .” When she must rebuild a stone wall in order to protect her flock, the young woman, who has never hefted a stone in her life, realizes that the only way to become a competent mason is to understand the weight and muteness of an ordinary stone. This she learns obliquely from her throng of sheep, and though they remain the ugliest, dumbest mammals she ever encountered, she grows to love their patience, their effortless mastery of blankness.

“The Garbage Man’s Daughter” is the longest story in the collection. Riddled with fantastic convolutions in a plot already dense with indulgences, the story involves Santa Claus, the Easter Rabbit, Jesus and an adversarial little girl who is obsessed with facts over faith. This baroque invention culminates at a mythical garbage dump and, in the course of 60 pages, begins to wheeze and buckle under its own weight. Here Duncan attempts to tackle directly the issues of faith and the failures of organized religion that he touches upon stealthfully and indirectly elsewhere in the book. The story’s excess stands out in a book otherwise distinguished by elegance and economy.

Duncan is at the height of his powers in “A Mickey Mantel Koan,” a memoir about afternoons playing catch with his ailing brother, John. “Why run around wrecking the world for pay,” he wonders, “when you could be standing in one place transcending time?” There exists in this memoir a fierce, elegiac force in every sentence. Limited by a heart condition, John lowers his goal to “junk-pitching” and perfects “a feeble knuckler, a roundhouse curve, a submarine fastball formidable solely for its lack of accuracy.” When John dies, none of his athleticism or vanity, especially regarding his auburn hair, is mentioned by the preacher who, says Duncan, “eulogized him so lavishly and inaccurately that I was moved to a state of tearlessness that lasted for years.” On the day of his death, John receives a ball autographed by Mickey Mantle, and Duncan’s mother, in a fit of grief, goes to the funeral home to show the ball to her dead son. “Enter my mother--who took one look at what the rouge-and casket-wallahs were doing to the hair, said ‘No no no!’ produced a snapshot, told them, ‘He wants it exactly like this,’ sat down to critique their efforts and kept on critiquing till in the end you’d have though John had stopped in to groom himself.”

Duncan has a knack for locating his narrators--fictional characters or the writer himself--at some juncture in understanding, a change of perception or heart that is usually brought about by nature’s unpredicatble forces: the progress of an incurable illness, an unruly team of horses or the currents of a bloated river. A reverence for the accidental, the uncontrollable and the uncertain lends to this varied collection an edgy sense of unity.

Purists may question the mixing of fiction and memoir within a single collection. Other readers will find that this collection invites speculation about the interplay between the actual and the imagined in a single volume of a writer’s work. Whether he is inventing or remembering, Duncan’s prose is both inventive and memorable.