<i> The News of the World by Ron Carlson (Norton: $15.95; 169 pp.)</i>

Ron Carlson sees patterns in lives. He sees love, struggle that is sometimes rewarded and bravery. He also sees love turned cannibal, defeat, poltroonery and the doping effects of contemporary life. But the outcome of his stories, whether upbeat or the opposite, tends to be an outpouring instead of an evaporation of spirit.

So he is a warm writer, and this makes the collection in “The News of the World” relatively unusual. This should not be exaggerated, but our better-known short-story writers tend to write cool, with more irony than assertion. They end with cadences that are not full but interrupted and that suggest drawing away more than coming together.

In “Life Before Science,” a painter who encounters a double sterility in his work and his life--he cannot paint and his wife cannot conceive--makes a double breakthrough. In “Half Life,” a teacher who has remained resolutely suspicious of a slickly assured student--and of his wife’s affection for the young man--suddenly moves out of his coldness when confronted by the student’s self-doubt.

In other stories, if there is defeat, it is accompanied by some form of lament. The protagonist of “Orchard Love” tries but fails to break away from the messy pattern of promiscuous sex that he, his wife and their friends have drifted into. In “Milk,” the narrator’s brief revolt against what he sees as one more symptom of society’s degradation--a neighborhood campaign to fingerprint children in case of abduction--promptly collapses. But in both cases, the message is not, as with a cooler writer: This is how it is, period; but this is how it is, and I detest it. Even foredoomed protest suggests hope.

Is this a virtue? I think so. Partly, because like all literary fashions, even absolute zero comes to seem warmed-over. And still more, because a writer is kept going by his form of engagement with reality, because belief is Carlson’s form, and because whatever keeps a writer of such sensibility writing has to be welcomed.

There are dangers. The pessimist’s definition of the optimist is that he is somewhat insufficiently informed. If Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver come out cold, it is the result of looking unwaveringly at their chosen subject, which is, of course, The Way We Live Now.

In Carlson’s weaker stories, there seems to be a waver. Sentimental is too strong, but there is a suggestion of patness, of arrangement, of an effect imposed at the end which, though thoroughly prepared, may be too thoroughly prepared. Carlson wants to find a design in things, even though this goes against the spirit if not the evidence of the times.

Yet in his best stories, he does find it. And he finds it by a kind of magic, by a credo quia absurdum in which the will to believe is suddenly snatched up and transfigured. Carlson’s dervish occasionally needs a jump-start, but when it gets whirling, we experience a vision touched by wildness sometimes, by audacity sometimes, and sometimes by the sheer pleasure of inventiveness.

It is at the edge of things that Carlson’s power works best. “The Governor’s Ball” starts with desperate normality. The narrator and his wife live in a Western state--Utah perhaps?--where many of the stories are loosely set. They have some unspecified place in local events; they are to attend the governor’s ball. On the other hand, it is bitter January weather and their pipes have burst, flooding their basement.

Winter tends to recur with Carlson; it is a sign of the worlds that lie at the edges of ours. Here, it has conducted a warning incursion. It puts the notion of the ball in a different light. “All that gray cleavage,” the narrator thinks as he hauls his frozen, ruined possessions to the dump.

Despite his wife’s urgings to get ready for the ball, he makes one last trip with an old mattress. On an elevated highway, it flies off his pickup truck and lands in a skid-row area below. Two derelicts, a man and a woman, help him retrieve it in exchange for whiskey.

In the spectral final scene, the two of them ride through the frozen city lying on the mattress in the back of the narrator’s truck. They drink and look up at the winter stars and she weeps because they are beautiful. The freezing water rising in the narrator’s comfortable home has forced him out into a wider universe, both abject and exalted.

In “Mme. Zelena,” Carlson gives us a different kind of omen. The protagonist is a comfortably middle-class woman, whose second-sight--her ability to see what will happen to people in the future--forces her to leave her pleasant family and take up a wandering life. As a child, her first vision was of a gray whale; toward the end, she sees it again and knows that it will fatally injure her in a freak accident on a Mexican beach holiday.

“I’m looking forward to that trip. I’ve never been to Mexico. It will be wonderful to see that whale again,” she says.

Even in his softer, more contrived stories, Carlson can achieve a rare quality of intensity in his narrators, who are usually men and often fathers. “The H Street Sledding Record” is a small domestic affair, rather too sweet on the whole, about a father who hesitates to ask his wife for a second child until the exhilaration of a Christmas sled ride gives him courage. Yet even here, Carlson finds ways to heighten the narrator’s expressiveness beyond the sentimental.

The wife and young daughter are decorating the Christmas tree; the father is stringing popcorn. “Once a year,” he reflects, “I get to sit and watch the two girls I am related to move about a tree inside our home, while I sit nearby and sew food.”

“The News of the World” is an uneven collection. Carlson does not have impeccable taste. We can feel shoved. But quite a few of his discoveries are more than worth the shoving.