BOOK REVIEW : Vignettes of Lust, Academia Mix the Clever and Ordinary : SHUFFLE <i> By Leonard Michaels</i> Farrar, Straus & Giroux $17.95, 162 pages

These stories and fictional sketches by Leonard Michaels range from remarkable to ordinary, and it is hard to find a thread to bind them together. “Shuffle” makes an appropriate title; it could also be: “What Do I Really Want To Write?”

Much of the remarkable writing, as well as some of the ordinary, is in the set of contemporary distances and ironies in the book’s first and longest section, entitled “Journal.” The 119 vignettes, some of them one sentence long, others running for several pages, are cool and abstract in manner, and unpredictable in effect. It is as if the same measured pellet were dropped into an array of test tubes, with reactions ranging from fizz to fizzle.

Many are a contemporary report on the battle of the sexes. Love or lust or both are the battleground; each pleasure is booby-trapped, and one or two of the booby traps explode in flowers. Michaels may not be a misogynist, but the wounds he counts are mostly on male bodies. A number of the sketches, in fact, are a man’s counterpart to the coil-springed vignettes of female woe set out a year or so ago in Susan Minot’s “Lust.”

A woman complains that her husband accuses her of sleeping with his best friend. “He ruined her nicest dinners. He ruined her sleep. All her efforts to make him happy--she ‘really tried’--were turned ugly by his suspiciousness.” Was she really sleeping with the friend? “Yes, but that’s not the point.”

Another woman emerges from church each week in her Sunday best to rendezvous with one of her lovers in the church parking lot. He wants her to marry him. Life’s too good, she suggests; wait until traffic policemen start giving her tickets. At the moment, “The cop looks at me and can’t seem to write it. When they start writing, ask again.”

Leaning over backward to propitiate women and minorities angers Michaels. So he leans forward. Sometimes his anger develops an interesting edge. Too often, though, it has the whiff of something held in so long that it’s gone off.

There’s a limp vignette about a black con man and a white wimp who truckles to his mixture of warmth and contempt. There is a sourer one about a black writer who is so good-looking that he doesn’t need to write.

Not all the men-women encounters are one-sided. In a number of them, men and women flounder equally in pain and uncertainty.

One of the best evokes the helpless, down-spiraling momentum of a marriage going bad. A wife goes reluctantly to a party at her husband’s urging. She surprises him by making a delicately beautiful silk dress for the occasion. At the dinner, a boorish table-mate bullies her into taking a puff of a joint; the ash falls and burns a hole in the dress.

Michaels, a professor of English at Berkeley, has a feeling for academic airlessness and the anaerobic life forms it can produce. There is a world of suggestion about today’s teacher-student power balances in his line about the corridors of a college building: “Behind the doors, professors are bent over student papers writing in the margins B-plus, A-minus.”

There are any number of one- and two-liners. A woman, trying to break off with her psychiatrist, pleads poverty. He halves his fee. It’s still too much, she says; he offers to see her free of charge, and she agrees. “She felt he really needed her.”

Many of these are clever. Like individual glowworms, though, they shine but don’t give off enough light to see anything else by. And some don’t shine at all. Writers, Michaels tells us, die twice--once in the flesh, and once when their books are forgotten. A mother answers her son’s phone call: “You sound happy. What’s the matter?”

In contrast to the up-to-date coolness of the journal are several conventionally evocative reminiscences. These are attached to a narrator, presumably Michaels himself.

There are sketches of his father and mother, told with warmth and agreeable but unremarkable detail. There is a sharper vignette of a high school teacher who quells his student’s brash questioning of “A Winter’s Tale” by telling of his own terrible wartime experience. It is argument by authority, and oddly persuasive.

Finally, there is a long, high-wrought account of the narrator’s youthful marriage to a brilliant, ardent and mentally unhinged fellow student. Told somewhat in the manner of the early Harold Brodkey, it has a beautifully precise evocation of life in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s. But the young woman’s wildness is too charmless, and the narrator is too unfleshed for their tragic passion to matter very much.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “The Orange Fish” by Carol Shields (Viking).