The title story in Charles Baxter's new volume of stories is about a man who is telephoned one day by another man. He claims to be his brother. They meet at a bar. They are indeed brothers. “Isn't this great?” exclaims one. Well, no, thinks the other. “It was horrifyingly strange without being eventful.”

It is a line which can stand for some of the deepest impulses of contemporary short fiction. The strangeness is the important thing, whether or not it is horrible, and it is the more strange because the less eventful. Baxter's stories may be richer in event than those in the new volumes of Richard Burgin and Stuart Dybek. This is another way of saying that Baxter's stories are less strange.

“I know that real astonishment is our deepest taboo—that even Spinoza would not consider wonder to be one of our emotions,” reflects the narrator in Burgin's first story; all of them are avid for astonishment, and almost baffled by anything which does happen—a group of old people having their picture taken, a brilliant grade school friend whose promise expires into ritualized stupor. Baxter, by contrast, is more secure with the sanction of narrative, perhaps because it keeps taboos of experience within the decencies of form, even as the form exposes the very notion of decency to a certain kind of studied horror.

Dybek's stories trace a more luxurious strangeness than those of Burgin. The narrator of his second stands in winter before steamed windows and imagines the street outside “with rings of vapor around the streetlights and headlights, clouds billowing from exhaust pipes and manhole covers, breaths hanging, snow swirling like white smoke.” Events in Dybek are seldom equal to moments such as these, and narrative, in a way, exists in order to try to contain them, because they are so profuse. In Baxter, on the other hand, there is a more manageable, even resigned, stance before life's vaporousness, while in the austere, cerebral Burgin the windows don't get steamed up very much at all.

The fiction of each of these writers can be regarded as a strategy for representing various kinds of strangeness within narrative while keeping it sufficiently inchoate and fugitive (or “relative” in Baxter's designation) so that whatever is strange does not quite coalesce into event and instead presides either above or beneath the plot. Why should this be so? In part because of a certain restlessness about form which troubles each of these volumes. Baxter's are the most conventionally realistic, but he includes three “parabolic” tales in which point of view is more concentrated upon a single character who is effectively isolated by the end from each tale. Burgin's stories are saturated by lists, which take up three pages in one instance and barely get enveloped by a larger narrative in the title story. Some of Dybek's stories are very short, hardly more than episodes, and they are linked with the larger ones as if they were fragments of a lost whole.

Just as compelling an explanation for strangeness is a certain disposition of character in each volume. Put too simply, everybody is consistently seen as a version of everybody else. This is less clearly the case in Dybek, whose East European refugees, Mexican and Polish adolescents, dreamy students, shadowy musicians, and abstracted lovers all have a local distinctness of outline because they are rooted in Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods. Burgin's characters, vaguely intellectual all, and just as vaguely artistic, could live pretty much anywhere, and do, which is one reason why so many of them are given as in the thrall of someone else's otherness, which baffles them like an identity. Baxter's volume offers a much wider cast of human types—homeless people, vagrants, foreigners, teenage runaways—but a common motion in many stories brings the representative of a more normal, secure center into a disturbing conjunction with someone heretofore as unimagined as a rejected or degraded self. “A version of my face was fixed on a stranger,” thinks the narrator of his brother in the title story, and the disclosure of such “versions,” albeit not usually so consciously registered, is what many of the fictions in all these volumes is about. Each of us can be comprehended as a possibility of many others.

This is indeed very strange. It's even horrifying, and it may be that any formal arrangement of event isn't adequate to clarify either the true measure of our relations to each other or the structures that prevent us from admitting, as for example a man on Baxter's last page acknowledges, that we can feel we have known “the secret of the universe for a split second.” This is the sort of feeling that characters in Burgin are far more eager to indulge, and he has one story, “Aerialist,” where the narrator does admit it, but is rejected by the woman, and so is left alone shuddering with dismay at the end while he considers yet another ecstatic sunset from his new high-rise. Dybek's people are in this sense positively mad with ecstasy. “Hey man, let's go dig some beauty,” cries one, but it is not long after when the narrator loses touch with him, and by the end of the story returns to the old neighborhood only to discover that he has lost touch with himself. It's not that life without strangeness wouldn't be life. It's more that strangeness is ultimately all there is, absolutely.

Is this because contemporary American life has become too familiar? Of course this point itself has become rather familiar. We have every right, I think, to expect of these volumes that they will tell us something we had not suspected, and one way to put this knowledge would be to say that our very familiarity with ourselves has become, well, strange. Our surfaces can now be impersonated so well that they hardly have to be lived. They can even be eerily articulated by others who have refused to live them. …

Different sensibilities, different moves—and, if possible, different constraints. Dybek could in one decisive sense not be more different a writer from either Baxter or Burgin because he wants a world where there are Glimpses available everywhere and at all times. There is in Dybek a richly textured landscape of churches, apartment buildings, movie theatres, prisons, viaducts and alleys. Kids play games with baseballs or bottle caps. Men tell anecdotes and legends. Life is not either so dense or so strange that the eventual departure from home of a pregnant young pianist—she refuses to say who the father is—will not be mourned, and her music still heard as silence. There are events, and they exert a shaping force. But the crucial difference can be indicated in terms of a statement made by one of Burgin's narrators: “Nothing can threaten identity like a flight into ecstasy—no matter how brief.” Identity is not so oppressive in Baxter as it is in Burgin; if it were, Glimpses wouldn't matter so much or seem so precious when they occur. In Dybek, however, identity doesn't matter very much at all and Glimpses are instead what the narratives strain to see.

They rarely afford ecstasy. Ecstasy is just a word anyway. “A name's what we use instead of smelling,” declares a nameless woman in a squib of a story called “Strays,” about her caring for an assortment of lost animals and birds. In The Coast of Chicago it is most urgent to make contact with life despite language, if not through it—and so the stories are full of kids who believe that rock songs played backward make audible secret messages from the devil, or uncles who talk to fish (in Spanish, not English), or old women who weep in languages (in one instance, Bohemian) which the narrator can't understand. In, I think, Dybek's most wholly realized story, “Blight,” which is, among other things, at once a curse and a paean to the very word, the narrator, years after having moved and then lived away from his blight-ridden youth, at one point returns to college. His instructor in English-lit survey spits when he reads. “When he read us Shelley's ‘To a Skylark,’ which began ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit,’ I thought he was talking about blight again until I looked it up.” The burden of Dybek's art is to make us discern that there may be no fundamental difference between “blithe” and “blight,” because there is some common essence behind each word that eludes them both.

Music expresses this essence better, or anyway purer. With music there is release from meaning. Dybek's stories are full of music, and one, “Chopin in Winter” (about the pregnant pianist), narrativizes the transforming power of music. In another story, “Hot Ice,” there is a moment after the two friends, Manny and Eddie, have been wandering around, via buses and the El, all night. Now it's morning. They still don't want to quit. It's hard to say why. “Manny could be talking Spanish, I could be talking Polish, Eddie thought. It didn't matter. What meant something was sitting at the table together, still awake watching the rain splatter the window, walking out again, to the Prague bakery for bismarcks, past people under dripping umbrellas on their way to church.” Much of Dybek's special sensibility is here, especially the way the words make their way to church. To say there is no music is only to say that the words which aren't spoken constitute nonetheless a mute testimony to the very presence that music expresses. By music we can hear what matters, especially if we must be, inescapably and finally, alone with ourselves.

Therefore it is the more strange, and strangely beautiful, that what matters hardly coalesces at all in life in terms of events. Dybek's last story is entitled “Pet Milk,” a lovely, lush meditation on what is always lost. One thing is an emblem of childhood that seemed to embody the very fact of the material world itself—the pet milk the narrator's grandmother used to use in her coffee as she listened in her kitchen to the radio. The narrator associates the liquid's creamy swirl with the liqueur he and his girlfriend, Kate, used to enjoy at their special Czech restaurant while each luxuriated in a respective first job as well as each other. They spoke of plans. “It was the first time I'd ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.” Another thing that is always lost is love.

One hot May evening the young lovers want each other so much that suddenly they flee the restaurant before they order dinner. His roommate will be home. They have to take the last subway express to her place in Evanston. On the way they make love inside the empty conductor's compartment. The narrator looks out and sees the surprised faces of commuters as the train speeds by each station. A high school kid grins and waves. The narrator can't forget it. “It was as if I were standing on that platform, with my schoolbooks and a smoke, on one of those endlessly accumulated afternoons after school when I stood almost outside of time simply waiting for a train, and I thought how much I'd have loved seeing someone like us streaming by.”

This is a superb conclusion to The Coast of Chicago, by far the most tightly strung of these three volumes. The characteristic figure has been this perpetual high school kid, sometimes limp and sometimes swollen with waiting and longing, about to go somewhere yet somehow already gone beforehand. He is his own lost possibility. He knows he's foolish. He's foolish to know. Life is ceaselessly elsewhere. Chicago is its coasts. It is difficult to give an adequate sense of Dybek's sensibility, how he indulges in romance, but crisply, or how he can be very witty (this is a very funny book in places), but severe. One of the boys in “Blight” is “Deejo,” a guitar player, who at one point has been writing the Great American Novel (of course entitled, Blight) which has the following first sentence: “The dawn rises like sick old men playing on the rooftops in their underwear.” His buddies are moved. “We had him read that to us again and again.” Then Deejo rushes home, ecstatic, and writes all night, to the 1812 Overture. His second sentence runs to twenty pages and describes “an epic battle between a spider and a caterpillar.” Dybek himself has of course better sentences. Many of them stun a reader as Deejo's friends are stunned. One way to characterize Dybek's art is to say that he never writes like Deejo (however one could cite sentences which are close), his own music is considerably less grand than the 1812 Overture, and yet he doesn't cut off his own discipline from the deeply felt crudity of that first sentence or even the naive, “epic” ambition to say everything about everything all at once.

The long central sequence (probably intended to be more musically exact than a mere medley) of stories, vignettes, events, and moments entitled, “Nighthawks,” is the fullest representation of this ambition. An unnamed narrator is between job interviews and drifts among the paintings at the Art Institute, always ending before Edward Hopper's famous painting, blank before the three customers who sit “as if waiting, not for something to begin, but rather to end.” There is more, much more, of this sort of thing. For some readers it will all be ineffable. For me, it got overripe by the end of the first section, when rain is visible in the streetlights: “each drop contains its own blue bulb.” There is sleepwalking, there is night luminous with the unseen light of dawn, there is an African musician who chants in an ancient tongue over his drumbeat. I prefer Dybek when he's more measured, and when some firmer narrative pressure works against the deliquescent lyricism. This is in one sense the meaning of the lengthy succeeding story, “Hot Ice,” about the attempt—eventually—of Manny and Eddie to get hold of a block of ice and release the saintly virgin whose abused body they believe has been frozen in it. Randall Jarrell has a review in which he judges a story as “manner … carried to the point where the returns almost stop coming in at all.” “Nighthawks,” on the other hand, serves up all its returns by means of manner only, and they're all hot.

“Hot Ice” concludes with the boys running away with the ice block. Suddenly Manny knows “where they were taking her, where she would be finally released.” Should we know? Ultimately it doesn't matter. Destination is just another name for release. All Dybek's stories strain to be released—from words, from events. Their spiritual home is still another way in which they contrast with the stories of Baxter and Burgin, whose respective routes, furthermore, are not nearly so sensuous, as if neither holds quite so sharp and plangent a sense of loss. But from another perspective—what is there to be learned from all these volumes if it is not that there are always available other perspectives?—Dybek has more in common with them after all. He has a charming vignette, “Outtakes,” about a boy who is enlisted to be an usher in a movie theatre, complete with wardrobe and stealthy movies in the dark. “So he became nocturnal,” we read, “a member of a secret society that knew itself exiled from the screen, but like outtakes remained part of the movie.” Dybek's high school kids are versions of Baxter's strangers or Burgin's narrators enlisted in the present tense. All, that is, are representable as outtakes from a movie in which they are part, even if the show on the big screen does not record them, and is not recorded by them as a social product or even a public occasion.

So the world in which all these strangers, victims, and exiles live is finally not as utterly known as it might first appear. It is certainly possible to discuss it without wondering if it has already been written by Raymond Carver or comprehended under the aegis of the postmodern sublime. Baxter, Burgin, and Dybek are fine writers, and not only because each affords Glimpses at something beyond the conditions of everyday life, past the limits of its events to represent. Nevertheless, I have emphasized the strangeness in them because of my persistent sense that strangeness—just that—now bids to be our only consolation, our only metaphysics, and our only narrative. Even the grand themes of love and death, or the enduring ones of identity and its trials may have yielded to the harsher, emptier ones of sheer strangeness. The ability of three such impeccably contemporary American writers of short fiction to trace this theme, so repeatedly and variously, is not the most obvious thing about them. It may be, however, the one with the most power, elusiveness, and virtuosity.