A Sinking World : BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO: Stories.<i> By Mary Gaitskill</i> .<i> Simon & Schuster: 249 pp., $22</i>

What’s wrong with men, anyway? is the question that puzzles and batters at the women in “Because They Wanted To.” It’s a pretty common question nowadays among our scribbling classes, and if that were all, Mary Gaitskill’s new short-story collection would risk the commonplace. It risks a lot--not always successfully--but not that.

Portrayed mainly through the eyes and hurts of the women protagonists, Gaitskill’s men appear as a defective lot, an over-bred species that, as can happen in stock-raising, has pretty much lost the capacity to propagate. That is, their equipment works OK and they use it adeptly as if it were a trendy sport, just as they cultivate wit, vulnerability and psychological shrewdness. Perfecting themselves, though, there is little chance that they will lose themselves in anyone else. Love is no longer the little death, as the French put it, it is a toning and conditioning activity.

So far, so glib, but this is only the surface of Gaitskill’s stream of stories. After a while we are aware of a deviation, the gravitational pull of an unseen planet. In the procession of men who seduce, men who promise to call and don’t, men whose gentleness turns momentarily brutal, men who confess previous, concurrent or even future-conditional entanglements, there are odd breaks. A human gesture gropes through, a hint of devotion, of pain, of imagination--yet there is barely a hint of faltering in the high, wry voice of female grievance.

Gaitskill, whose writing seems deliberately to combine mastery and jagged roughness--”Reader,” she seems to say, “this will be no easy ride and you will get bruised and scraped”--only gradually provides us with two revelations. One is that under the grimness of these stories there is comedy. Not the kind that lets you off the hook, as in the movies and TV, but the kind that impales you, inquires if it hurts and abides the reply: only when I laugh.

The other revelation is that there is something amiss with the complaining: not in the complaint itself--the pain of her women is indisputable--but in the complainer. It is the women, after all, who are the heart of the stories (two that are ostensibly told from a male point of view are the least successful) and who set out to encounter the world: jobs, families, money, hope, fear, disappointments, passions and, among other things, men. That they are largely defeated is only in part a statement about the world; more profoundly, it is a statement about them. Their women’s voices are the voices of human alienation and disarray.

“The Dentist,” teetering spectacularly between comedy and pain, is one of the most accomplished pieces in the collection. Like the song character who fell in love with a big blue frog, Jill, a magazine writer, has developed an obsession with her dentist.

He is a mild, unassertive man but one day, as he wrestles with a stubbornly impacted wisdom tooth, she feels a primal male-female thing getting loose. Not only does he have his fingers in her mouth (the dentist violation we all go through), but his professional demeanor cracks under the brute force needed to dislodge the tooth. For a moment--she feels it, he may or may not--it is grunting caveman and supine victim.

There is an infection, a series of visits and soon she is confiding her troubles as if he could extract them as well. Her computer breaks down on deadline; amiably, he offers the loan of his laptop. For her, the symbolic combination of male force, protection and consideration is irresistible. Her pursuit is incandescent and absurd; the mild attraction he feels wavers--after kissing her he leaves to feed his dog--and turns to panicky retreat.

Jill is neither victim nor fool; she is also both. The signals of the modern sexual game and of modern life in general are so balefully inscrutable that each step is a trap. Jill is absurd, but she is tangled in absurdity very much as the heroine of Richard Foreman’s play, “Rhoda in Potatoland,” is tangled among wires and honking noises--and she is equivalently, mysteriously indomitable and appealing.

One of the most moving stories, “Because They Wanted To”--the title piece--tells of a runaway teenager who baby-sits for the three children of another waif who is off looking for a job. The day and night Elsie spends in the grubby room, feeding the children peanut butter and drawing on her meager resources to try to keep them quiet, are a dirge for a sinking world.

She thinks of her own family: Its instability is the perplexing sum of the decency and good intentions she recalls of each of its members. What is it, then, that has driven her out to live on the streets?

Centering on the feverish chaos between men and women, most of the stories are nevertheless built around the theme of a sinking world and upon the question “What is it then?” Gaitskill does not ask the question directly; she voices it in the incoherences, the sudden swings of mood and logic and the perplexing emotional maneuvers of her female characters.

Her style reflects these disjunctions; seemingly impatient with the seductions of evocative writing, she can hurl out images that are like a toe getting stubbed. “A cosmetic redhead stared back at Margot, her gaze a slim, tingling thread of sensory thought,” she writes. Or “He was driving a new car, so elaborately appointed that it made her feel like a vegetable in a velvet box.” On the other hand, she can write of a former academic star, now coasting: “He had once been quite a hotshot but he had since gone to seed in the manner of an old cat who knows where to find the food dish.”

In one of the stories, the protagonist is a lesbian; in two others, more complex, she oscillates, searching between men and women. The men offer the greater illusion, danger, disillusion and shipwreck; the women, to these bisexual protagonists, offer erotic fire, intimacy and sterility. Neither alternative works.

Gaitskill’s most thorough exploration comes in “The Wrong Thing.” The narrator traces her successive painful involvements with three men and her affair, painful in a different way, with a young woman. The men are recalled with a deliberate and puzzling emotional inconsistency. The first, unnamed, has just died: She thinks of his sexual power and his sadism with both anger and tenderness.

Perhaps it is her humiliation that clouds what follows. She meets a much younger man; the attraction is strong and mutual, but she comes to realize that he is withholding himself, seeing other women and, worst of all, craving her admiration more than her passion. The third man courts her with grace and ardor, but again she feels that between the two of them stands a rival: the man’s image of himself.

This is complex and difficult. What is clearer and more vivid is the contrast with the narrator’s affair with the passionate and flighty Erin. She is inconstant and selfish, but there is a refreshing directness in her sexual greed. Yet while desiring her, the narrator feels an airlessness in their relationship. “It felt like a doll’s house with tiny plastic furniture and false windows,” the narrator says. “It felt both safe and cruelly stifling.”

Heterosexual shipwreck versus the polymorphous morose. Gaitskill, sometimes awkward and not always clear, has explored the darkness of her alternatives with stories that at their best are bright steel.