Presently he reaches out his hand and touches her hip. . . . He runs his fingers over her hip and feels the stretch marks there. They are like roads, and he traces them in her flesh. He runs his fingers back and forth, first one, then another. They run everywhere in her flesh, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. He remembers waking up the morning after they bought the car, seeing it, there in the drive, in the sun, gleaming.

Her stretch marks, his convertible: it comes finally to that. The story, like much of Carver's fiction, is permeated with the nakedness of the moment. This is Carver's great strength: stunning immediacy, remarkable pathos. No other American writer can make a reader feel, as he does, right up against it when a character experiences loss of hope. It is impossible to resist the power of such writing, and while I'm reading the story I don't. But then I find myself turning away. The atmosphere congeals. I feel manipulated. These people fail to engage me. I cannot be persuaded that life between Toni and Leo was good when the convertible stood gleaming in the driveway. What's more, I don't think Carver thinks life was good then, either. I think he yearns to believe that it should have been good, not that it actually was. This yearning is the force behind his writing. What fuels the intensity of his gaze, the clarity with which he pares down the description, is not a shrewd insight into the way things actually are between this man and this woman but a terrible longing to describe things as they might have been -- or should have been. The sense of loss here is original and primal, unmediated by adult experience.

Connection between people like Toni and Leo is predicated on the existence of a world in which men and women conform to a romantic notion of themselves as men and women. These two have never been real to each other. They were bound to end in her stretch marks, his convertible. Carver knows that. Instead of being jolted by what he knows, startled into another posture, he feels only sad and bad. He mourns the loss of romantic possibility in each life; in Carver's work, story after story"What Do You Do in San Francisco?" "Gazebo," "They're Not Your Husband," "Little Things," ''What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"is saturated in a wistful longing for an ideal, tender connection that never was, and never can be. Carver's surrogate character seems always to be saying, "Wouldn't it be lovely if it could have been otherwise?" In short, the work is sentimental. Trapped inside that sentimentality is the struggle so many women and so many men are waging now to make sense of themselves as they actually are. The struggle has brought men-and-women-together into a new place; puzzling and painful, true, but new nonetheless. In the country of these stories not only is that place not on the map, it's as though the territory doesn't exist.

There's a novel by Richard Ford in which the narrating protagonist says, "Women have always lightened my burdens, picked up my faltering spirits and exhilarated me with the old anything-goes feeling though anything doesn't go, of course, and never did. . . . [But now] . . . I have slipped for a moment out onto that plane where women can't help in the age-old ways. . . . Not that I've lost the old yen, just that the old yen seems suddenly defeatable by facts, the kind you can't sidestep -- the essence of a small empty moment." Frank Bascombe delivers himself of this insight on page 61 of The Sportswriter and then goes on speaking until page 375 exactly as though he hadn't. Taking in his own experience is not what this man is about.

It is inconceivable in The Sportswriter that a person who is a woman should strike Frank simply as a familiar, as another human being floating around in the world, lost, empty, shocked to the bone by the way it's all turned out. He feels compassion for women but not empathy. At bottom, they do not remind him of himself. The only character in the book who even comes close is his ex-wife, and she, incredibly enough, is called X. It is X who brought on the divorce, X who found the emptiness between them unbearable, X who wanted to take another stab at living her life and, although she looks like a busy suburban mother, X too seems to be floundering and suffering. We can only deduce this from the hints Frank throws out. We never see X straight on. She is a shadowy figure, always at the periphery of Frank's vision. One would assume that he would know her well. But he doesn't. She is the ex-wife. In his mind, the people who embody his condition are other men he runs up against in a random fashion. There are these men, who are like himself, and then there are the women, who can no longer give comfort against the overwhelming force of life.

Dubus's characters -- blue-collar people who live in the old mill towns not far from Boston -- are mechanics, waitresses, bartenders, and construction workers. They have almost no conversation in them, and very little sense of things beyond their own immediate needs. They drink, they smoke, they make love: without a stop. Inevitably, the limitation of appetite becomes apparent, and they begin to suffer. When they suffer, they do terrible things to themselves, and to one another. There is nothing any of them can do to mitigate the suffering. They cannot educate themselves out of their lives; they can't leave home, and they can't get reborn. This situation is Dubus's subject, the thing he concentrates on with all his writer's might. His concentration is penetrating. We feel his people trapped in their lives so acutely that they enter into us.

In Dubus's work, sexual love is entirely instrumental. Men and women are alive to themselves and to one another only in the mythic way. They provoke in themselves the fantasy that romantic love will bring one to safe haven. They are tremendously influenced by an idea of "men" and an idea of "women" that Ernest Hemingway would have understood and approved of, but that many people today find alarming, if not downright silly. The reader can see early on that the marriage in Adultery will come to disaster. Without genuine connection -- that is, connection of the mind or spirit -- sexual feeling quickly wears itself out. Such love is bound to come a cropper. Yet neither Dubus nor his characters see what the reader sees. In many of his stories, the characters are middle-aged and have been through these affairs many times over. Yet they remain devoted to the fantasy. They resist taking in their own experience. Theirs is the distress of people unable to arrive at wisdom.

The despair of these writers can never be as moving to a reader like me as it is to the writers themselves. At the heart of their work lies a keen regret that things are no longer as they once were between men and women, a regret so intense that it amounts to longing. It's this longing, endowed with the appearance of hard reality, that informs much of their writing. But from where I stand, the hard reality is this: that question about why things are not as they once were has got to be asked honestly, not rhetorically. Then something more might be known about why life is so empty now, and the work of writers as good as Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford would be wise as well as strong.