Seconds of Pleasure: Stories

Married men

In a series of plays, screenplays and films (including In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors, The Shape of Things, and The Mercy Seat), Neil LaBute has established himself as a chronicler of the violence and cruelty lurking beneath the surface of American lives. Confession has often been his favoured vehicle, although his is a light touch: introducing the screenplay of In the Company of Men, he explains his preference for "long takes", "just sitting back and watching, almost voyeuristically, what's going on between the characters". Content to let his unsettlingly recognizable men and women (but mostly men) reveal more than they intend, LaBute aspires, too, like his favourite Restoration dramatists, to criticize his audience as he entertains: his note to Your Friends & Neighbors (in which one character directs Wycherley's play The Country Wife) concludes that "One must be cruel to be kind".

Each of the twenty short stories in Seconds of Pleasure, LaBute's prose fiction debut, revisits the discomforting territory of his dramatic work, and its formal concern to show, rather than tell. Some are highly confessional first-person narratives, others free indirect ramblings. The collection's fallible, damaged and largely nameless cast of characters are observed in moments of extreme tension or disillusionment, frustration and betrayal, constantly in search of those elusive points of empathetic or ecstatic connection named in the collection's title (which is also that of a song by its dedicatee, Elvis Costello).

As in his plays, it is the proximity of desire, disgust and violence in the male sexual psyche which is LaBute's primary interest. Seconds of Pleasure describes a wide range of men, particularly married men, behaving badly. In one story, a middle-aged man lusts after teenage girls ("Boo-Boo"). In "Perfect", which self-consciously echoes Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Birthmark", a younger man is disgusted by a small blemish on his wife's shoulder, and dreams of gouging it out. Women are most often merely the objects of cruelty or infidelity, or its calculated victims, like the prostitute who stars in one narrator's first snuff movie ("Ravishing"). But the women are no better than the men: one seduces her ex-step-father, hoping in vain for a glimmer of recognition from him ("Maraschino"); another remembers lying to protect her father from punishment for a terrible crime ("Opportunity").

Two stories feature that most American, most masculine symbol of freedom and power, the automobile. In "Open All Night", a flat battery in his new Saab convertible strands a married man at a strip club, but an off-duty dancer helps him push his car to a nearby garage, and gives him a lift home. The story is a gem of frustrated expectation and unexpected intimacy. In "Full Service", a faintly obsessive and neurotic man becomes fixated by a female motor mechanic. The contiguity of the stories fleetingly suggests an artfulness in the organization of the volume as a whole, juxtaposing both pathos and psychosis in masculine identities in crisis. Like all the stories, they suggest the fine line between lying to oneself and betraying one's partner, the slippery slope between the careless and the malicious.

In "A Second of Pleasure", which comes closest to being the collection's title story in name and theme, the memory of an unexpected moment of affection prompts a woman to end an extramarital relationship. Entirely composed of dialogue, the story demands close attention from the reader to determine, at times, who is speaking. LaBute has a playwright's ear for dialogue, and his director's eye for the telling gesture is often conveyed in the briefest narrative observation. But the story also demonstrates the potential pitfalls of rendering the cadences of everyday speech, as the conversations of couples close to breakup or breakdown frequently threaten to become merely a collection of mundane exclamations. "Some Do It Naturally" reveals a further problem. While clearly a homage to Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", the conversation about an unplanned pregnancy here leaves nothing to the imagination. LaBute turns the situation into an episode, with an eavesdropping narrator, an older man for whom the lovers' predicament echoes tensions in his own relationship. But the narrator's commentary, an increasingly vitriolic interior monologue, sits awkwardly with the reported speech of the couple contemplating an abortion. In this case, LaBute does dialogue best, but is more interested in the narrator's pathologies.

Neil LaBute's repertoire of quasi-filmic techniques has some unexpected pleasures. In "Opportunity", for example, the reader watches a car coming out of the fog, overhearing the woman passenger's monologue only so long as the car is, as it were, in view. In his best stories, restrained third-person narration and nuanced dialogue, unexpected moments of intimacy, and suggestions of narrowly averted violence recall the work of Raymond Carver. But Seconds of Pleasure is an uneven collection, and some of the shortest stories read like sketches for screen treatment. Among these are four first person narratives, two describing inconsequential or idealized sexual encounters ("Grand Slam", "Wait"), another two the narrators' observation of women at parties ("Look at Her", "Los Feliz"). Other stories have unexpected twists. In "Spring Break", assumptions about who is the younger and who the much older partner are undermined in the final pages. In "Time Share", the reader's assumptions about the gender of the parties caught in a compromising pose are cleverly undermined. The twists make these one-trick shows, however, and overshadow the fact that both would otherwise have had more than enough to recommend them, making a second reading far less satisfactory, and, sadly, unlikely.

Andrew van der Vlies recently completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford on the publication and reception histories of South African literatures in Britain

• Read more about this book