A teen-age boy is a junior partner in his mother's crafty conning of a single, moneyed, Midwestern man.

An unbalanced young woman steals a newborn baby to keep as her own.

A girl with no past and no future drifts from one bad husband to another.

A cult leader swindles the community and leaves town with one member's wife.

An FBI agent, investigating a dead body in the White House Rose Garden, runs into a coverup from the top down.

In one sense, these five sentences summarize the stories in this new collection from a major American writer, E.L. Doctorow. But in another sense, the descriptions are misleading.

These scenarios are familiar, almost to the point of cliché; we read stories like this in the newspaper every day and watch fictionalized versions on television at night.

But Doctorow, the author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel and seven other best-selling novels, is a writer of remarkable gifts. He moves his pen across these age-old stories with a master's touch, and they become both original and deeply affecting. In each case, they surprise with unexpected turns, and these turns bring us back to a familiar place viewed from a different angle.

One of Doctorow's gifts on display here is characterization. These are short stories, not novels, and so the writer doesn't have the leisure of hundreds of pages in which to bring a character to life. Doctorow treats even the most unlikely losers with such a combination of humor and compassion that we connect to their problems and plights, however unsavory or self-inflicted.

In the first story, "A House on the Plains," the narrator is an 18-year-old named Earle whose shrewd and unscrupulous mother regrets that he isn't just a little brighter so that he could be of even more use to her than he is. He follows her lead, even when he can't figure out where they're going.

"We're still in business, Earle," she assures him. "You can trust me on that." And that's all the assurance he needs.

Of their teamwork, he says, "She had her plans and was looking ahead. I had no plans. I had never had plans - just the inkling of something, sometimes, I didn't know what."

Several of the main characters in this collection could say the same about themselves - no plans, just following instructions, drifting, bouncing off walls, in and out of trouble. Jolene, in "Jolene: A Life," believes that she has repeatedly "stepped into a situation that was making her life miserable." She's not responsible, and she doesn't see a way out until circumstances provide one.

Jim, the narrator of "William John Harmon," is a lawyer who has drifted into a religious cult, following his wife. When she runs off with the "prophet," the William John Harmon of the title, Jim remains in the now-leaderless cult; his faith strengthens, and he comes to believe that he, as the cuckolded but forgiving husband, can serve the community as "an exemplar of our Ideals."

All five stories demonstrate the writer's characteristic ironic touch; each story has twists and reversals that undercut our assumptions. Doctorow does this not in an O. Henry fashion, but subtly. Small details take on surprising importance not obvious until the final paragraphs. Reading these stories a second or third time brings new insights and appreciations.

Finally, as in his novels, Doctorow is a master of place. Earle is in involuntary exile from Chicago, living in the house on the plains. Here, Earle remembers his old home town: "I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and the peddlers and the boom and clank of the freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind. I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up under the worst God had to offer."

Earle regrets that you can't get that "magnitude of defiance" on the plains.

In most of these stories, characters gaze wistfully at whatever their symbol of that magnitude is. All five stories are fine and memorable. "A House on the Plains" is a masterpiece.

Mary J. Elkins is a faculty member in the Honors College at Colorado State University.