MISS LEONORA WHEN LAST SEEN by Peter Taylor. 398 pages. Obolensky. $4.95.
Most writers drop a pebble in some domestic pool and write about the splash. Peter Taylor waits, and from the vantage point of memory, recalls the ever-widening rings of ripples that slowly subside as if nothing had disturbed the surface.
Taylor's territory is the borderland of Kentucky and Tennessee before, during, and immediately after the Depression. In these 16 stories, his themes are love, marriage, childhood. As he peels away the layers of the past, he finds in an early-morning walk to a drugstore or a family dinner implications of lives...