Slapboxing With Jesus, by Victor D. LaValle

Vintage, 213 pages, $11

The young men in Victor LaValle's observant, lyrical story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus -- black and multiracial guys from Flushing, Queens -- don't want to fight; they just talk tough. ("Talk shit, that was our game. Run fast, that was our game," says the narrator of "Class Trip.") But their bravado doesn't fool anyone, least of all the women in their lives -- the mothers, grandmothers, girlfriends, and hookers who have stuck around after the boys' fathers have fled. These women all know that tenderhearted vulnerability lies just below the raw talk. But the multiethnic turf wars that rage in Flushing have forced LaValle's maturing boys to beat or get beaten, and the throb of violence invades the narrative in quick jabs.

Each of these 12 interconnected vignettes (divided into two parts, "The Autobiography of New York Today" and "One Boy's Beginnings") bristles with the rhythm of streetwise talk. LaValle's characters understand the power of language, and they use it to get what they want: sex, money, a way out of Flushing.

In an early story, "Ancient History," childhood buddies, locked in a competition over who will leave Queens first, trade taunts on Rockaway Beach after one friend joins the army, guaranteeing himself a quick exit. In another, Anthony, the prepubescent character at the center of the book's second group of stories, sells his skills as a writer to his lovelorn teenage neighbors. His legendary letters seduce legions of teenage girls with talk that is by turns sweet and dirty, until this self-proclaimed "family man" connects his services and their results with his beloved baby sister and all the other fatherless kids in Queens.

Although much of the book gains momentum through the energy of LaValle's stylized language, at times the tireless bob and weave of the narration snags on phrases that the author has too artfully flip-flopped. Several of the stories falter, too, when LaValle ends them with startling plot twists; these shocks seem out of step with the rest of his remarkable prose.

These minutely observed vignettes are strongest when LaValle sticks closely to his characters' thoughts. Their startling revelations about their neighborhoods, their parents, and their bodies unveil the young men's sharp sense of beauty and of the absurd. In these moments, LaValle taps the currents that flow through the nerves of his edgy characters, and the electric charge of youthful desire illuminates his astounding stories.

-- Nicole Lamy