BOOK REVIEW / STORIES : Glimpses of Men’s Struggle for Buoyancy : THE BOOK OF GUYS: Stories, <i> by Garrison Keillor</i> (Viking: $22, 345 pages)

In one of the handful of very funny pieces in this collection, and the only one that appears to be straight nonfiction, Garrison Keillor describes his stage debut in a high school talent show.

Keillor, as shy then as he is today, decides to perform after Dede, the event planner, implies that he couldn’t possibly be talented. Stung, Keillor resolves to impress her with his hidden showmanship and is eventually persuaded to recite a poem.

The poem, unfortunately, is Whitman’s somber “Oh Captain! My Captain!” and Keillor knows it will go over like a lead balloon. In the end, though, the evening is a triumph, because Keillor recites the poem with a lisping English accent, having realized that “there comes a time to let go of principle and do the right thing.”

Keillor does the right thing in many places in “The Book of Guys,” and you can look high and low and never find a trace of principle.

His target in most of these stories is the men’s movement, and while it is already overripe for satire, Keillor adds a few twists--partly, one suspects, because at some level he identifies with its adherents.

In a mock speech with which “The Book of Guys” opens, the narrator describes his experience at a celebration-of-manhood retreat, and it’s both hilarious and poignant.

“Girls had it better from the beginning,” he says. “They were allowed to play in the house, where the books were and the adults, and boys were sent outdoors like livestock. . . . Boys ran around in the yard with toy guns going kksshh-kksshh, fighting wars for made-up reasons and arguing about who was dead, while girls stayed inside and played with dolls, creating complex family groups and learning to solve problems through negotiation and role-playing. Which gender is better equipped, on the whole, to live an adult life, would you guess?”

Men in this story may drink and spit and complain and wear T-shirts that say, “Help me. I’ve fallen and I can’t reach my beer,” but Keillor makes them seem forlorn rather than ridiculous.

That goes double for the hero of “Lonesome Shorty,” a cowboy who tries to settle down but finds he just can’t bear domestic life: Lonesome is moved by the fact that his girlfriend’s china pattern matches his own (“A cowboy gets sick of the sound of his fork scraping a tin plate”) but doesn’t want to be admonished for roping street lamps at 2 in the morning.

The narrator of “Marooned,” similarly, believes wedlock would go more smoothly if his wife would leave well enough alone. “Our marriage is like the Electoral College,” he says. “It works OK if you don’t think about it.”

One rather disquieting feature of these stories is that Keillor sounds almost sincere at times. In “Don Giovanni,” for example, Figaro catches up with an old friend, lounge pianist Don Giovanni, and as always the Don rails against marriage.

“The married guy has to have an airtight explanation for everything he does by himself,” he says. “If he wants to go for a walk around the block alone, he has to invent an excuse for not taking his beloved with him. . . . Married guys can’t go nowhere. There always has to be a plan, a list of errands, a system, a destination. Alone, your life is intuitive, like poetry. With a woman, it’s a form of bookkeeping. . . . That is marriage, Figaro. A boy’s constant struggle to maintain buoyancy.”

More perturbing than disquieting is Keillor’s use of the surreal, which in some stories seems no more than a device to keep the narrative going.

That’s emphatically not true of the very entertaining “Zeus the Lutheran,” however, in which the Greek god, hoping to seduce the wife of a Pennsylvania minister, infiltrates his body--only to be trapped there by Hera, who has employed lawyers to thwart Zeus’ infidelities and seize half of his divine power.

Keillor captures a wonderful moment in the battle between the sexes when he has Hera think, “Why fool around with lightweights when you’ve got me, a real woman?” and Zeus mumble to himself, “I should have been a swan. Definitely a swan.”

“The Book of Guys” displays a darker, more reckless side of Keillor and, although sometimes off-putting, it carries that unmistakable, irresistible Keillor earnestness.