Big as Life: Stories About Men.

The most perplexing problem presented these days by a book-sized collection of short stories written by a single author is that the truly wonderful stories--and there are almost always at least two--tend to make the other less-than-wonderful stories, those that may be simply good or even just okay, seem downright embarrassing. Why, when the writer can write something great, does he or she choose to publish something merely competent? The notable strengths of the perfectly wrought story, in which voice and vision effortlessly fuse in order to embody character and plot, are detected as crudely realized impulses in the lesser stories. The author's obsessions and habits begin to look like annoying writerly tics rather than gifts of spirit or craft. The reader's greedy desire, whetted by excellence, won't be satisfied by sentences that plod instead of startle or sing.

And amid all these doubts, the miraculous quality of the great story fades, precisely because the reader begins to learn more about the author--his habits, missteps, indulgences--than about the characters who bear witness to the author's vision. The "trick" of fiction fails--its ability to deliver us straight through language to the realm of the inexpressible, though common, experience of living. Instead of wondering about the meaning of our own lives, we begin to wonder about the personality of the person who tries, again and again, to jump-start a fantasy that never quite takes off.

Both Big As Life: Stories about Men by Rand Richards Cooper and Cold Snap by Thom Jones contain several great stories, the kind that expand the reader's world by sweeping him or her into someone else's consciousness so deftly that, for a few moments, reading about that life feels more urgent than living one's own. Quite simply, these stories are grand achievements, stories that transcend their moment of composition. But Cooper's "Going the Distance" and Jones's "Superman, My Son" are not the only stories in these volumes, and, literary merit aside, these pieces, taken along with their companions, can provide us with some insight into the creative preoccupations of the two late twentieth-century American men who wrote them.

It is noteworthy that, despite vast differences in style, despite a display of defensive tics ranging from intellectual detachment to rowdy bluster, both Cooper and Jones seem terrifically befuddled by just what it means to be male and American at this particular historical moment. And although Jones wants to grab his readers by the throat and immediately dunk them into the current of this frenzied "unknowing"--just take a trip through his opening sentences--and Cooper depends on his narratives to work by engaging his readers, intellects--just read his volume's subtitle--both writers demonstrate an almost old-fashioned hope that simple storytelling can begin to clear things up for us all.

The ostensible similarities between these authors: an interest in Africa, in boxing, in the military, belie their striking differences in style. Jones is nervy and nervous at once, sputtering and ranting, letting his mind seem to zing randomly off the surface of the stuff of life. Cooper is much subtler; no linguistic razzle-dazzle is in evidence, and almost all of the stories proceed at the same cautious, studied pace. Yet these stylistic differences can mask a profound ideological similarity: a mounting conviction that people are doomed to an awful, at times grotesque, loneliness that no amount of talking can overcome. Both men use the vehicle of the story to trace the social heritage of such loneliness and to let the reader experience just how awful and inexorable this state can feel.

For Jones, the isolation occurs at the level of the human organism. One thinks of the great Russians, Dostoevski and Nabokov. Their thematic awareness of the ability of individual consciousness to shape and infuse "objective reality" with meaning infused their own fiction with a breathless and nearly miraculous luminosity and seriousness. But Jones's grasp of consciousness has been degraded by scientific awareness; a little learning has become a dangerous, and at times boring, thing. His narrators and his characters for the most part wallow in a neuronally charged chemical bath from which there is no escape. The temporal lobe, the pancreas, the heart, secrete their own juices; human medication, legal and illegal, mixes the concoction into a brew that determined the course of one's life. Jones doesn't simply write about these states; his narrators are mired there.

And although to contemporary readers such visceral narration may sound innovative and shocking, it often sounds highly reminiscent of much of the swooning, though sincere, work of the English Romantics: Shelley, Lord Byron, Coleridge, when the opium was delivering the visions. The claustrophobic self-awareness, the narcissistic sense of naughtiness, can feel like entrapment to the reader. However, when Jones is working at his best, as in the title story, the narrator's own quirkiness displaces his creator's, and the story opens more widely and more wonderfully than its elements suggest. In fact, it is precisely when Jones's inventions begin to undermine his writerly habits that the visionary potential of his style emerges, as when the elderly father in "Superman, My Son" displays an acutely critical, yet unabashed and tender love for his wrecked son, daughter-in-law, and nephew. At a moment such as this, the reader is swept by the power of story to forge belief in basic human decency despite all despair; such grace cannot be easily accounted for.

In contrast to Jones, whose characters almost always feel throttled by biological imperatives, Cooper keeps his distance from the individual body and focuses instead on the social and cultural norms that sweep individuals into the currents of action. Although the tone of the resulting stories is completely different, the outcome for the characters is heart-rendingly similar: the sense that one has no control over one's life. Cooper, too, hearkens back to a basic Romantic tenet that is foundational to current American therapeutic belief: Childhood is a time of unintentional innocence which is often warped by adult interpretation and remedy. The late twentieth-century twist that makes this tenet doubly moving resides in the assumption that we are all still inhabited by inner children who have not yet been totally corrupted; hence, just as childhood is without end, so is the chance to be dashed even in great old age.

Cooper inhabits the same terrain as certain great suburban/urban intellectuals like Katherine Mansfield, John Updike, John Cheever, who display a belief that life is made up of a series of societally determined developmental moments which seal one's fate. For the writer, these moments are fraught with significance even though an individual character may remain clueless as to the role they play. The authorial detachment required to pull off the now common narrative feat of informing the reader, while at the same time pulling the wool over a character's eyes, results in a mild irony that has grown so familiar to our ears that we may no longer detect it. Instead the tone is at once earnest and blase, a slightly bewildering combination. So when Cooper charts the vulnerable transitions in men's lives, we hear the various ways in which unusually sensitive, intelligent boys are trained to be bewildered guys, always running the risk of being perceived as rougher, more devious, more wicked than they really are.

"Seeming" matters to these guys. If Jones's characters tend to demonstrate an almost studied indifference to the opinions of others (although one suspects they'd be horrified to learn they resembled "normal" suburban guys), Cooper's characters want to appear to be just as good as they know they really are. To be misunderstood is not simply a sign of isolation; it embodies the moral predicament of the good, late twentieth-century man. Yes, gender plays a role. How does a man convince woman of his goodness without quelching that woman's right to see him through her own eyes? And if men cannot see one another accurately, how can women see them at all? This undercurrent of concern hums throughout numerous stories.

But just as Jones hits his stride when his stories seem to explode beyond the boundaries of his intentior's, so does Cooper. "A Soldier Loyal and True" starts as a somewhat choppy narrative inquiry into a harsh father's love for his laughter and then magically lifts into a story about the saving grace of imagination to grant infinite chances for redemption. And "Going the Distance," in its simple, forthright presentation of a feisty old bastard who cannot see how his cruel gifts have blossomed in his grown son's life, blasts free of Cooper's ideological determinism by allowing the situation its full complexity.

Perhaps I am old-fashioned in my belief that the brilliant quirkiness of the four stories cited (plus several others) would be more noticeable if the authors had waited until they'd written a few more wonderful pieces to shape their collections, but then we would have had to wait too, not even knowing that we were waiting. And as both of these men attest, knowing anything at all beats knowing nothing, particularly when a millennium is ticking to its close.

Elizabeth Beverly is a writer and ethnographer who teaches at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.