BOOK REVIEW : A Rude Tumble Out of (or Into?) Reality : OUT OF WORK: Stories and Novella <i> by Greg Mulcahy</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf; $21. 193 pages.

In the first and one of the best of Greg Mulcahy’s bleak fictional sketches, the nameless protagonist has not only lost his comfortable job but, times being what they are in our no-longer-so-new recession, he is falling out of his world altogether.

He and his wife have had to sell their house and rent cheap. She still works, but he mopes around clipping supermarket coupons, doing the shopping and trying to squeeze the household budget down to $30 a week. One morning he finds a flyer advertising a food club--bulk buying, generic products, surplus canned goods and so on. He ponders a sample menu.

“Seemed like a pretty good deal, maybe not as big a savings as claimed, but a savings. The problem was the menu’s vagueness. It said pasta . What did pasta mean? He would get a pound. If he got fettucine or lasagna, he would be happy, but he did not eat asini de pepe or vermicelli, and what if they gave him shells?”

Mulcahy is portraying more than an economic pinch. He is writing of a deeper disintegrating panic. His protagonist is not just hard up. He is an exile. He is excluded from the bright world of brands and choices, from America as it advertises itself to itself. He will finally nerve himself to join the club. It is a grim warehouse in the factory district, surrounded by rubble and protected by razor wire. To join he must work there 10 hours a week. He is no longer a shopper; he is a serf.

He is also, as the grizzling about vermicelli suggests, infantilized. And that and the serfdom are the point, time and again, in Mulcahy’s brief vignettes, some only two or three pages long. The author is writing about a society whose masters have curtailed their people’s vitality, decency and sense by stuffing them with goods and promises. When these are withdrawn after the boom times run out, only the curtailment remains, and a mortgaged future.

His characters have lost their jobs; their employers have been bought out or acquired by multinationals. They have lost houses, cars, health insurance, identity and restraint. Many have turned violent, some have stockpiled weapons. In one story, a newly jobless man is robbed and knee-capped when his car breaks down; he is taken to a for-profit hospital run by a Philippine syndicate and there he is stripped of whatever money the robbers have overlooked. He gets a job in a nuclear waste dump--this is a recurring theme--and in his spare time he sits at home pointing a pistol out the window.

If Mulcahy writes about economic, political and economic curtailment in an America that is simultaneously winding down and shaking itself to bits, he embeds his theme into the structure of his writing.

His style is also curtailed. Bits of information are missing. Sentences lack parts of speech. His characters have been stripped of character. They are pieces in a chess game of disintegration.

In a story about two yuppies who go on a fishing trip loaded down with new equipment, only to revert to primeval savagery when their canoe sinks and they are marooned, we get the stripping-down right from the start:

“Jim and Sam have planned the trip for months.” They have no attributes other than their names as they play out their descent from “civilization” and nothing distinguishes Jim from Sam.

This intensifies the bleakness of the new times that Mulcahy is parableizing, but it is also a limitation. With a surface realism that is skewed in ways that suggest Kafka sometimes, and sometimes Donald Barthelme or Robert Coover, Mulcahy gives us the latest news. Like news, many of the pieces have a cramped sameness.

“Glass,” written at novella length, departs from realism entirely to tell the surreal adventures of Eddie, a painter, through a Nighttown America. A sinister master manipulates him, first as a cynical art dealer and later as a variety of exploitative impresarios.

In a contaminated time and over a contaminated landscape Eddie revolves along the downward spiral of a Candide who lacks even the reward of embittered wisdom.

The most ambitious of the pieces, “Glass” is also the least successful.

A nightmare landscape needs a suggestive dreamer. Eddie is all but indistinguishable from the things that happen to him and the fumes of despair he moves through for 100 pages, without seeming to have moved at all.