and Updike while contemplating an affair. Indeed, women pose continual problems for these men, though their slipshod relationships seem to be symptomatic of a larger sense of disenfranchisement. As one narrator puts it, “Chaos cannot be measured along a spectrum: there are six billion varieties...."

From among this six billion, Amdahl gives us a generous sampling, each instance complicated and unpredictable. A hockey player, Neale, is reminiscent of the epileptic soldier-protagonist of Thom Jones’ “The Pugilist at Rest.” Each is a tough-talker who has doled out and been on the receiving end of violence; each suffers from a head injury; and most importantly, each surprises the reader with thoughtfulness and erudition.  Neale’s emerges in bursts, seizures of articulateness:

I have no time for this quotidian busywork!…Roundtable exchanges of reasonable views and compromise and balanced diets and designated drivers—you want sanity and routine, find a farmer! I’m crazy! I’m a star! I’m out of my mind! I’m tired of the virulent smugness of these people and their struggles to reconcile check registers with bank statements!

When later, he attacks a male figure skater for “desecrat[ing]…the ice with sequins,” he fully recognizes that “some of this was just alpha male in the presence of a desirable female…[but] not all.” Here, as is typical in these stories, self-understanding seems ever-imminent, yet ultimately evades the characters.
     Amdhal’s writing becomes downright lyrical in “The Barber-Chair,” which jumps from sled-dogging in the Northwest Territories to Connecticut and the party with guest Arthur Miller. “The Barber-Chair” opens in the Arctic with sheer poetry: “The sky was as blue as if all space were blue, as if the outer darkness and all its unimaginably remote crystalline spheres and slowly revolving heavenly bodies were shades of blue. Thirty big dogs had drilled holes in the snow with hot jets of urine.” Amdhal is equally elegant in depicting a convention in

 

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