Sam the Cat and Other Stories
By Matthew Klam
Random House, 243 pages

The Sleepover Artist
By Thomas Beller
Norton, 296 pages

Venus Drive
By Sam Lipsyte
Open City Books, 160 pages

Never Mind Nirvana
By Mark Lindquist
Villard, 239 pages

In case you're wondering what to expect from a book called "Sam the Cat and Other Stories," the cover of Matthew Klam's first book provides a helpful clue: It's a photo of a guy's crotch with the book's title laid out to form an erect penis and the curve of a scrotum below. With its promise of daring but fizzy fun in a masculine package, the cover suggests that publishers, having exhausted the possibilities of "Bridget Jones"-style "chick lit," have decided to give the guys a shot.

And, in fact, there are several books out this season that plow territory similar to Klam's, including Thomas Beller's "The Sleepover Artist," Mark Lindquist's "Never Mind Nirvana" and Sam Lipsyte's "Venus Drive." All, like "Sam the Cat," concern white guys in their 20s and 30s; they're often urban, and they're usually single, with an unsettled quality to their lives. The characters vary in their class backgrounds and in the fanciness of their educations, but they all seem to feel emasculated by the girlified rituals of dating, relating and marrying, as well as by the difficulty of finding their place in the can-do, go-go boom economy.

But sadly for those who would like to see a revival of fiction about (and primarily for) men, these publishers' efforts are doomed. Forget the attention-grabbing cover: Klam's book is a perfect example of how and why most of the current crop of guy fiction fails to create compelling -- or marketable -- literary characters.

Since popular opinion often states that men (at least, or especially, the American variety) are basically inarticulate about their feelings, the job of the writer who takes them as a subject is to find something emotionally legible in their lack of apparent interest in their own deepest selves. This can produce, paradoxically, writing that's far from shallow. Richard Ford, to give just one example, has turned the American male resistance to self-examination into a vital and resonant theme. And, of course, Hemingway at his best managed to convey a male inner life without actually getting in there and poking around too much. As he once said, his writing was like an iceberg, showing you only the visible tip, while the huge mass of emotions lay concealed beneath the surface.

But Klam and his fellow guy authors are writing characters who grew up in a post-therapy, post-Venus-and-Mars world. If they don't talk about their feelings, at least they know they're supposed to; "Issues I Dealt With in Therapy" is the title of one story by Klam. His stories are almost all written as first-person confessionals. In a revved-up everyday-guy language that at times feels exhilaratingly original, his narrators tell us how they feel about their girlfriends and wives, their sex lives, their jobs, their fathers. They talk about themselves a lot, often analyzing their own personalities with a surprising honesty: "I've been a certain way my whole life," says the narrator of "Not This." "Mr. Showcase, Mr. Jokey, Mr. Handshake. After a while, even I can't stand it. I look down on people. I've got a short fuse. I piss on my friends."

But what, exactly, does this self-knowledge serve? In story after story, it stops at the point where it might open out to new kinds of understanding about why a character has ended up where he is or about the choices facing him in the future. It's the reverse of Hemingway and Ford: Instead of very little talking that manages to reveal a deep self, there's a lot of talking about a very shallow self. Instead of the strong, silent type we get the smug, garrulous type.

The narrator of "Not This," for example, doesn't grow or change over the course of the story; he merely settles deeper into a defeatist slump over the fact that, after his latest quasi-violent outburst, his on-and-off girlfriend -- "the best-looking, the smartest, the best dressed" he's ever had -- has left him for good. Klam's characters don't experience emotional transformation, and in this way the book subverts one of the basic components of fiction: The stories have no turning points, no real epiphanies. That in itself might be a kind of epiphany -- I supposed the idea would be that much of life is really just the same old thing -- but it's not a particularly promising one, and it's certainly not worthy of the seven story-length variations on it that "Sam the Cat" comprises.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"