The spaces between

EVEN if writers are not especially showy, most intend us at least to linger upon a metaphor or a sentence, to notice the brightness of a phrase. But Samrat Upadhyay is among the smoothest and most noiseless of contemporary writers. His is an abstemious art. He sees that his characters, mostly members of the middle and lower classes -- businessmen, middle-rung workers, housewives, servants -- do not think in any obviously literary manner, and he strives to keep his work in the same key as their lives. He resolutely eschews metaphors, makes sparing use of colons and semicolons, and almost never resorts to that word so favored by short-story writers: "suddenly." His work is so subtle that it does not even seem especially subtle.

Although he has resided in America for nearly two decades, Upadhyay has never lost touch with his native Nepal, a country that has produced very little English-language fiction. Indeed, the capital, Katmandu, is the locale for all of his work. His debut collection of stories, "Arresting God in Kathmandu," showed people negotiating a thicket of choices in a close-knit, tradition-bound society in which the needs and preferences of families are as important as those of individuals and various codes of caste and class restrict the free intermixing of people. (For example, even adults cannot marry without parental approval and, in fact, often have their life partners chosen for them by their parents.)

In a magazine interview, Upadhyay described life as "a constant negotiation between limits and freedom from those limits, regardless of culture." The country of his birth has given him an especially rich mine of material; the tension between individual freedom and societal constraints is evenly weighted and, therefore, narratively compelling. It is to his credit that in his 2001 stories and the 2003 novel "The Guru of Love," he writes about Nepali society in English, for a primarily Western readership, without ever letting the whiff of exoticism invade his work.

Upadhyay returns in his new collection of stories, "The Royal Ghosts," to themes familiar from "Arresting God," the most pervasive of which is the struggle of men and women to understand each other, to work their way across the hollows and uncertainties that lie between them and find a way of living together. He often writes from the point of view of an interested third party, not just one or the other protagonist. (As if to dramatize how intricately people's lives are linked with others, his stories always attend closely to the lives of at least four or five characters and how they feel about one another. This gives his stories a kind of novelistic roominess.)