A few years ago a friend lent me a great book of short stories called A Stranger in This World. The first striking thing about it was the cover: a Nan Goldin photo of a guy in sunglasses next to a pool that I'd see a couple years later at a Goldin retrospective at the Whitney. Compellingly, the cover suggested a real world of hangovers, drunken arguments between couples in worn-out motel rooms, the tacky style of lower-class America, dashed hopes. The kind of cover you turn half-expecting to see the writer's made-up world instead of read about it.

I read that book in a single evening. From the first story--about a teenager driving from Florida to Washington DC with his gin and tonic-drinking father to get his estranged mother, who's been found by cops passed out with a broken arm on the subway, out of the hospital--to the title story, about a grieving widow who seduces her boyfriend's brother and then steals his pants and his car and leaves town, Stranger served up a powerful splash of gritty realism with the occasional dash of surrealism thrown in for good measure. In "The Victim," a young couple is held captive by a gun-wielding psychopath in his home, which is a trailer set on its side, the furniture nailed to what used to be the floor so that everything is sideways. At one point he forces the boyfriend to perform oral sex on him (" . . . tears are standing on his cheeks as he starts to pump his head back and forth, slowly, and Lyle's head eases back on the worn brown sofa cushions."). Later, when the victimizer turns victim and is killed by the couple, they drive off in their Volvo and see the sun rising behind gas stations and fast food restaurants in a scene filled with a grotesque, existential despair ("She can see with perfect clarity the uselessness of justice . . . she looks at Bobby, for instance, and sees Lyle's cock in his mouth and a gun at his throat, and knows that she will never see him any other way, that if she ever kisses him again they will both remember, and this seems sad."). In "Pretty Judy" the reluctant protagonist, Paul, is an awkward high school kid who begins a sexual relationship with Judy, a rotund, older, mentally retarded girl--"You couldn't tell what was wrong with Judy by looking at her face, except that she would forget sometimes to close her mouth, and easy questions would worry her. Everything she felt was on her face, now round as a cartoon sun, pleased, elbows on the sill . . ." Paul guiltily decides one day "with a sudden rush of moral correctness" to take her to the zoo (with "the terror of discovery behind every fence"), and a stressful outing turns catastrophic in a rowboat in the middle of a lake when Judy starts freaking out and screaming for her mother. I actually cringed when Paul notices the zoo policemen trolling toward them to investigate, realizing in the story's final sentence "how badly this was all going to end."

The author of these stories, Kevin Canty, followed up Stranger with a novel, Into the Great Wide Open (whose cover also features Goldin's work), a coming-of-age story about a boy, living with his terminally alcoholic father, who falls in love with a girl from a wealthy family whose familial world offers everything that his own dysfunctional home life lacks. In this book Canty employs a unique style of writing that works: an abundance of sentence fragments and an indulgent, though sparse use of sentences with no subjects. Again, Canty is able to describe a world with a few well-placed, minimalist brush strokes: "Kenny's father wasn't doing well. Last seen asleep on the sofa in the living room of the apartment, three in the afternoon. Kenny shut the TV off, covered his father with a chenille bedspread, took the melted highball off the coffee table, out of harm's way."

Typically, Canty's characters occupy the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, appear awkward as they stumble along through other bandwidths, drink too much, talk too little, experience a perspective-shifting epiphany but, in the end, remain the same disaffected, shattered innocents they were to begin with. Canty's writing is similar to Raymond Carver's. (There's an interesting parallel between the ending of Canty's "Pretty Judy" and a certain Carver story--which was dramatized in the film Short Cuts--at the end of which a young couple find themselves locked out of the apartment their neighbors have asked them to watch for a while on the day they're due back; for the past several days they've been going through their neighbors' things, spilling over potted plants, and the place is a wreck . . . Carver ends it with something along the lines of, "and they braced themselves as if against a growing storm.") Symbolism doesn't run too deep. Sentences are kept short and simple. Brutal realism and honesty are the rule. Add to this a cool, stark poeticism, and you've nearly got Canty.

For me, the ability to make the reader cringe uncomfortably is an essential trait of powerful fiction. That's why I was pleased to see Canty's latest, Nine Below Zero, on the bookshelf a couple weeks ago. I recently called him at his home in Missoula, Montana, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Montana. The first thing I ask him about is the Goldin covers on his first two books. Were they his idea?

"It came as a surprise. It's funny because my wife is a photographer and I'd seen The Ballad of Sexual Dependency [a photo series by Nan Goldin] in a slide show a few years before," but, he says, the idea for the covers came from the editors at Vantage, who published his first two books. Canty's writing always struck me as autobiographical, and I expected him to have had a somewhat fucked up time growing up. "I didn't," he tells me. "For the most part my work isn't autobiographical. I went crazy in high school like everybody else, but really I had a pretty normal childhood." On Into the Great Wide Open Canty muses, "I wrote that first draft really quickly, and I used a lot of furniture from a lot of people's lives. The character of Junie is taken from a few different people I knew growing up, and so there are three or four people out there who think that it's them."

Author Canty

Still, the 46-year-old Canty took a rather circuitous route to be where he is today. He tells me that he never finished high school, and got his G.E.D. when he was 18 or 19. He took a variety of jobs, working in construction, on the railroad, and even as a gopher killer. Over the 20 years it took him to get his degree, he played in rock and roll bands. At 38, while a graduate student at U. of M., he was shocked when his first short story was picked up by Esquire, "The Victim." Three years later Stranger was published.

On teaching creative writing Canty says, "It gets you out of the house, which is a good thing for a writer, which is a pretty solitary pursuit." Can creative writing actually be taught? I ask him. "It's time consuming and, I'm thinking more and more lately, bad for you in a way. I'm only really writing when I don't know what I'm doing . . . Teaching reinforces a tendency to fall back into certain patterns. Setting yourself up as an authority is a nebulous position. Creative writing can't really be taught, it can only be coached."

I ask him about the Raymond Carver influence in his writing and Canty responds, "[Carver's] really important to me, along with the other writers of the 70's short story revival . . . As a writer I'm interested in speed. The writers I tend to love are those that move along."

Speed was not an element in his latest novel. The press release says it took Canty over 10 years to complete, and it's obvious: Disappointingly, the book is overrun by his stylistic meanderings--indiscriminate and profuse sentence fragments and subjectless sentences, an eccentric style of writing that, utilized sparingly and successfully in Great Wide Open, reads laboriously here. The novel is too thought out, and its story and characters suffer accordingly. It retains the Cantian charm and working class cynicism, but falls far short of his first two works. I ask him if he's satisfied with it and he tells me, "As a writer you look at your own work and it's like looking at your face in the mirror. Some days you like it, some days you don't . . . I found places in there where I wrote it as best I could, and there are other places where I'm not sure that it works." John Gardner wrote of fiction "as a dramatic representation of the anguish of moral choice," and Canty is consistently expert at its delivery throughout all of his books. As Gardner also quipped, however, "Nothing leads to fraudulence more swiftly than the conscious pursuit of stylistic uniqueness," of which Canty seems guilty in his latest. If Nine Below Zero is an unfavorable blip in Canty's body of work, his first two stand as memorable successes. He's now working on some short stories, and I hope that with his next collection he returns to the speedily-rendered genius of his earlier work.

Tom O'Connell is a freelance writer and editor in New York City.