Courting disasters

One OF the cruelest ironies of modern letters is that so many books are written about male insecurity -- consider the oeuvres of Bellow and Updike, and work down from there -- and yet so few readers of serious fiction seem to be men.

This irony is especially piquant in the case of Steven Wingate’s new story collection, “Wifeshopping.” Trust me, fellas, even if you think you’ve been a bad boyfriend, the protagonists assembled here could teach you a thing or two about despicable conduct.

Nearly all are in the thrall of misguided wooing. They want sex (naturally) and companionship (to some vague extent), but mostly they want to bask in the glamorous notion that they are the marrying kind. It’s almost sweet, really -- until it turns toxic.

Consider the restless composer in “Knuckles.” He initiates a passionate affair with one of his neighbors, a woman mourning the loss of her child and husband. As he makes inroads into her fragile psyche, he wears his patience and loyalty like a snazzy new suit. But when the widow undertakes a gesture of grieving too public for his liking, he snaps.

“There was something intractable about her then,” he tells us, “something implacable that I would never be able to understand or accept, and the love affair I thought we could have began to look weird. Began to look one-sided, with me constantly sacrificing my needs to accommodate her dead husband and son.” His solution is to humiliate her, which drives her deeper into her grief.

Wingate specializes in such bruising moments. His characters are forever chasing their romantic delusions into narcissistic ruin. It never takes much for their rescuing desires to pivot into sadism.

The narrator of “Inside the Hole” has a pregnant fiancee with preeclampsia, a condition that makes carrying a baby to term difficult and dangerous. He wants to be the sort of guy who’s going to stand by her.

But he’s also repulsed by her anxiety. “Screw being afraid of her fear,” he declares at one point. “I couldn’t live like Nikki wanted me to, couldn’t spend the rest of my life walking on eggshells to hide how I felt. Lying to myself and burning up inside, feeling bad just so my wife and kid wouldn’t have to. I’d never make it, never be the kind of guy who stayed. It was in my genes like failure, like rot.”

It doesn’t take a psychologist to discern that his disgust with Nikki maps his unconscious feelings of fear. But Wingate’s characters are stubbornly impervious to such self-revelations. They know how they feel, but not why. Their self-knowledge hits a dead-end at rationalization. All of which makes them easy enough to believe. As a former romantic predator -- albeit a fairly inept one -- I can attest to the authenticity of Wingate’s tales. As could pretty much any woman on earth.

But can we like these guys? That’s another matter. Which is to say, as gripping as I found these stories, I didn’t always feel moved by them, because the heroes rarely seem to risk much loss. They happily perform what Wingate calls “the copulation waltz,” but they never enter the province of heartbreak.

“Once you’re past a certain age and a certain point of desperation,” one of his heroes tells us, “the only debate you have about whether or not you’ll sleep with the person in front of you happens inside your own head -- they’ve got almost nothing to do with it.” Well, OK. Maybe so. But such low stakes can feel dispiriting.

Not incidentally, the richest story in the collection, “In Flagstaff,” centers on Bethany, a woman who returns to her Arizona hometown for a funeral accompanied by her intended, an insecure playwright. It’s apparent from the start that Wingate is better attuned to Bethany, more sympathetic to her than to his other protagonists. On the plane ride over, for instance, we get the following gem of insight: “She looked at the redhead’s legs, then glanced at her own. A small bird of inadequacy flew out of her, but she paid it no mind.”

It’s this sense of affiliation, of revealing her weaknesses in the service of saving her from them, that makes the story so satisfying. As events progress, Bethany comes to see the selfishness of her fiance and decides, rather impulsively, to have sex with her sister’s former boyfriend, who is still living in Flagstaff. He’s far less accomplished than her fiance, but he truly perceives her. Then something quite unexpected happens: They fall in love and live happily ever after. It’s a wonderful twist, and one that doesn’t feel in the least sentimental.

Wingate is a fine storyteller and a writer capable of exciting flights of language, whether he’s describing a fellow with a “big beard and eyes of arson” or the “slightly wrinkling skin” that women get around their eyes “when age becomes more insistent about nudging youth off of center stage.”

It’s these powers of description -- and keen insights -- that pulled me through his squalid journeys. And it makes me hope we’ll see more books from him -- ones in which he will turn his sharp eye toward more enduring forms of love.

It’s much scarier, after all, to live in the bed love makes for you than to slink out the back door. *