Good Ol’ Country Sense Comes to Fore : THE TOMCAT’S WIFE, <i> Carol Bly,</i> HarperCollins, $19.95, 224 pages

It has been said that Carol Bly detests being thought of as a “regional writer.” That state of mind is roughly analogous to a redhead hating being a redhead or a Chinese person railing against his Asian heritage.

Bly is a regional writer, and she’s incredibly lucky to have such a terrific region to write about. If it’s true that she brings rural Minnesota to life, it may be equally true that Minnesota itself--the snow, the small towns, the depressed cities like Duluth--ignite Bly and fire her up to write stories that couldn’t be written by anyone else.

These tales in “The Tomcat’s Wife” carry a mind-set that keeps in balance two world views. “City-America” may think of these two views as antithetical, but as Bly brilliantly and laconically demonstrates, time after time, they aren’t opposites at all.

Rather, they overlap, in ways “City-America” may have all but forgotten. It is possible, Bly suggests, to live in small, religious, relentless monotonous towns and still be intelligent, sensitive, interested in life and all its strange turns and--above all--capable of action. Conversely, it’s possible to come from a city, have a large vocabulary and an advanced degree and still be a four-star jerk.

Really, each of these stories deserves a long review of its own. Since that can’t be done, let it be said that the title story concerns a city couple who moves to a small town: the wife “can’t have children,” and her husband, a psychologist, torments her literally to death, more or less ignoring his own ludicrously low sperm count.

It’s the kind of story that makes your flesh crawl. We’ve all known people like this particular couple. The point here is how the town--isolated, ordinary, poor in goods if not in spirit--unites to heal itself of the influence of this awful man.

“My Lord Bag of Rice” takes up the story of a woman, old now, who has spent her life married to an oaf, now mercifully dead. But despite the fact that her life has been smudged and tainted by “Big Red Chief,” as her dead husband used to smugly call himself, now the widow finds a good man, a kind man, who lives in the third floor of the old-fashioned home she owns now, renting rooms to boarders. . . .

Those three-story homes! Bly uses them over and over in the most straightforward symbolic ways. The basement is for crazies, the first and second floors for adults only and that mysterious third floor is reserved for the good guys, for those closest to God. You don’t find those houses everywhere. You do in Minnesota.

In “After the Baptism”--a terrific story--a grandfather, a patriarch, struggles to keep his unraveling family together. His son is an embezzler and has had to suffer the indignity of a shotgun wedding. His daughter-in-law and her parents practice a different religion.

Nobody likes the idea of this marriage, this baby, this baptism. To top it off, the grandfather owns a chemical factory and demonstrators with irate signs keep tramping across his front garden yelling about the “agony” that his chemicals cause. Within these concentric personal and public storms, there is a peaceful screened porch where the families spend the afternoon and painful home truths are told. It is a Northern story in a Northern house! Bly makes these landscapes live in astonishing ways.

Twin themes of suffering and rescue float through these tales.

Wives get beaten and take revenge years later by withholding painkillers from their dying husbands. Old men, old women, are carefully pitched out of polite society, where they starve in the streets. But in each of these communities, there is an element, a force, for common-sense good (a wife, a nurse, a janitor, some senior citizens) able to perceive injustice, to unite to fight it and to perform daring rescues to set things right.

I think that’s regional literature talking, a rural Midwestern-Northern voice. And thank God for it.

Next: Bettyanne Kevles reviews “Living Fossil: The Story of the Coelacanth” by Keith Stewart Thomson (W.W. Norton) .