Importance of Everyday : The earnest Americans in these stories live decent lives, support families, but struggle with the complexities of close relationships. : WORKING MEN: Stories, <i> By Michael Dorris (Henry Holt: $19.95; 286 pp.) </i>

Fiction writers have a natural fascination with ordinary jobs. Holed up alone in our offices, we gaze out windows with the left-out feelings of children kept after school, and fantasize, when our writing stinks, of friendlier ways of making a living. Michael Dorris’s fascination takes the form of 14 varied but cohesive stories in this skillful collection, each offering fresh perspectives on those faceless Americans who seem to have no definition beyond what they do, but whose hidden lives are full of poignance and complexity.

Whether male or female, Michael Dorris’s characters are often powerless in love relationships, finding themselves subject to the whims and options of others. In “Earnest Money,” a feckless man who evaded the Vietnam draft by going to Canada, returns to Montana after his father’s death, inherits $13,000, and finds himself turning it over to a scheming woman he’s hastily married. “The thing was, I recognized her bossiness for what it was: the instruction booklet that up to then my life had been lacking. It was a relief for questions to come with the decisions already made, to have firm opinions to rub against. After passing so many fair days, Evelyn was a thunderstorm that knocked out all competing electricity.”

In “Anything,” Aileen goes to a Burger King to form wedding plans with the dull man she’s engaged to but doesn’t love. She gets a phone call there from a pining former boyfriend and she jilts her fiance for him. The former boyfriend changes his mind within hours, saying he’d fleetingly felt “empathy, complete, selfless love” for her, but then it just “switched off.” And Aileen sees the bleak future she’d barely escaped--”stuck and wondering why”--in which she could have been married to either man “without ever actually choosing to do it.”

And in “Qiana,” an oafish New Hampshire snowplow operator finds a fancy shirt at a yard sale and falls into an affair with the former wife of its owner. With his own wife, Irene, Normand had “the kind of arrangement a twin brother and sister might concoct, the kind where two people had read each other’s minds so long they had lost interest in the novelty.” With the divorced woman, Normand invites an identical disdain, so that “she found herself wishing that Irene still had the daily care of him, the cleanup chores, the small duties of praise and complaint, the silent dinners for two.” And so he fuddles his way back to his wife.

But if they’re helpless and confused by emotions, for the most part these “Working Men” are supremely confident and present in their jobs. In the “hatless, gloveless temperature” of autumn, Normand overhauls the snowplow’s engine and slowly peruses the back roads that will soon be filled with snow, “alert for soft shoulders or runoff ruts that might catch a wheel. Alone on these reconnaissance trips, Normand regarded himself as a professional, an expert who saw what ordinary men might miss, and when he identified a loose bed or an unsupported erosion, he congratulated his keen eye and forgave himself his sins.”

And here is an architect of ponds: “To start a job, you drive a nail into a peak of ledge, pound it deep, make it your benchmark, your one-hundred scale. The transit measures from that arbitrary point as you compute all distance in links and chains. Weather patterns can alter, crops grow, houses get built and collapse, but you can return in 50 years and position a tripod, rotate the dials of the spirit until the air bubble precisely crosses the hairline, then aim an alidade at that solitary, centering nail and be in business.”

Easily the most affecting story in the collection is “Jeopardy,” about a shrewd Allied Pharmaceuticals salesman and seeming Lothario who is forced to wheedle and con his way past clinic receptionists in order to get to the doctors for a few minutes. “Sympathy’s the key to Lisa’s lock, as it is with a lot of them. You open your heart wide enough, she presses the buzzer under her desk and it’s Hello Sesame.” But he has not opened his heart wide enough to admit he has homosexual affairs with fellow salesmen on the road, or that the father he loved has just died. When, in his grief, he calls a favorite receptionist at home, she interrupts him with thanks for an inhaler that seems to have saved her son’s life. And he thinks, “There’s purposes we don’t suspect, side paths we don’t venture but a few steps down, and yet there’s a give-and-take that leads forward, a surprise when we don’t even know we need it.”

Whether he’s writing comically about a high school football coach who fakes his way through his classes in French knowing little more than oui, or seriously about a postgraduate anthropologist in an Alaskan fishing village, Dorris’s details are authoritative and apt, his voices distinct and persuasive. Even stories written in the first-person female have the feel of authenticity. And his writing is often stunning in its shorthand poetry: “Without Dad around, Mom was horsepower with nothing to move.”

Michael Dorris is best known as the author of the novels “A Yellow Raft in Blue Water” and “The Crown of Columbus” (co-written with his wife, Louise Erdrich), and of the nonfiction account, “The Broken Cord,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. “Working Men” features fiction previously published in “Mother Jones,” “Ploughshares,” “Northwest Review,” and other literary quarterlies, as well as four new stories. All are strikingly different, and are told with flair and efficiency and honed craftsmanship. “Working Men” is admirable not just for its mastery and variety, but for Michael Dorris’s faith in the heroism and importance of ordinary American life.