THE NOT-SO-SUBTLE message is this: If you're cool, you like Matthew Klam. It's a very specific cool: downtown New York cool, not afraid of money but not in thrall to it, sexual, worldly. You are also not easily offended--in fact, you are quick to write off those who are too sensitive, too politically correct; afraid, perhaps, of art. This pedigree has been carefully sculpted by who knows how many people--Klam himself, his editor, his agent--and is conspicuously aided by blurbs for his debut short story collection, Sam the Cat, that cover the bases of all degrees of cool: Junot Diaz (the talented downtown boy), Jane magazine (girls who know what's what), Dave Eggers (hot new postmodernist). Klam's stories--all seven of them--appeared originally in The New Yorker, and the contrast (an established, still slightly stuffy old magazine featuring a young writer obsessed with sex) also seems, but may not have been, a calculated choice.

In short, there is no reason on the surface not to like Matthew Klam, but I am here to say that I don't. I tried, I really did, to get into the spirit of these stories. They are all, to a letter, the same story, of men in their 20s--young but with middle age hovering in the distance like a future hangover--who cannot figure out how to live with women, or with themselves. They are callow, articulate, confused, and almost always misguided in their actions. And one week after reading this collection, I couldn't remember a single discrete story. My mind had cobbled all of the protagonists together into one unattractive male, a terrible advertisement for the gender.

Part of the problem is that Klam really seems to hate women, or has cultivated a writer's persona who does, and his prose is as artless about it as possible. Historically, I don't have trouble seeing through a certain amount (even an inordinate amount) of misogyny to find a book's outstanding qualities. Hemingway, Roth, Paglia, who else? Somehow I made it through those writers without feeling an overwhelming revulsion, a need to put the book down. But Klam--well, let's let him speak for himself:

"He took off her bra. Her tits fell--down. He tried to raise one up to normal height, where it had been in the bra, and then he tried the other. Bloop. Like deflated bags of water, hanging down to the waistband of her undies, cold, the consistency of chunky soup. She looked at him, her sad eyes smiling, her sad mouth looking for its tongue, her sad tongue looking for a crack in her lower lip to lick."

Now before everyone gets all hot and bothered, I know the difference between a writer and his characters. I know that this passage reflects the character's own self-loathing and unwillingness to enter fully into an emotional life. I know that there is humor in it, and that throughout the collection, Klam is as merciless about his protagonists as he is about their women. They long for women as much as wish they would go away. And yet, after 200 pages I didn't feel the least bit redeemed by walking around in these men's dark psyches. None of them seemed redeemed either. I didn't feel closer to truth of any sort, no matter how unpleasant. I felt only bludgeoned. There was, simply, no art to it.

You can see why people like these stories. They have an appealing slickness--writing that seems dangerous but doesn't bite. "You walk into a supermarket or restaurant," he writes, "your girlfriend goes in first and you're looking at her ass. And you say to yourself, 'Isn't that the most beautiful ass? That's mine. It's beautiful.' Like it's going to save you. An ass isn't going to save you. What's it going to do? Hide you from the police? Call up your boss when you don't feel well?" So, you get to participate in Klam's naughty ironic scenarios, the ass obsession of his tribe, the glib disavowal of anything that threatens to become deep or important. It's an attractive option, this life, but the art representing it--at least in this case--is completely forgettable.

There are differences, of course, from story to story: one character's confusion about his attraction to another man; another's witnessing of his brother's ideal life (which, predictably, unravels before his eyes); a spectacular disaster of a toast at an unpleasant friend's wedding. But these differences are like pixilated details, and as you move further away from the stories, the collection smoothes into a whole portrait of one man--one wrong-headed, slightly dim, horny, ambivalent man. I hope, for Matthew Klam's sake, that it's a portrait of someone else.