Filler and Foam, Nonstop : LOVE AND WILL <i> by Stephen Dixon (Paris Review Editions: $18.95; 193 pp.; 0-945167-20-2) </i>

Reading these 20 irritating, unstoppable, sometimes amusing and on rare occasion touching stories by Stephen Dixon puts one in mind of Samuel Beckett, and of the words Beckett once put in the mouth of his character Molloy, in the famous novel of that name: “Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.”

The prolific Dixon’s gift, indeed, seems to lie precisely in this ability “never to stop saying,” to keep spinning out words no matter what, to fill up the page against the horror of--of what? In Beckett’s case, it was done in an admittedly doomed attempt to fight against the horror of the existential abyss of nothingness. In Dixon’s, it seems, it’s done for another reason: to fight against the horror of--well, against the horror of not writing another story. Surely, one thinks, the aims must be higher than that, the themes deeper and the purpose grander. Perhaps so. But both in subject and manner, the pieces here often strain such a hope.

These are stories that come to the reader always at a fast-forward, breakneck, cartoon-like pace, as if time were about to end and the writer had better hurry. Take “Arrangements,” for example, chronicling in seven pages an entire marriage, from meeting to death: “She comes into my room. I hold her hand. She kisses my lips. We undress one another and go to bed. Later, she dresses and leaves. I sleep for a little while and dress and go outside. I see her talking to a man on the street. I say, ‘Hey, how are you?’ ” And at the end: “She nods, closes her eyes, dies. I go off, but it’s never the same with anyone after that.”

Maybe that really is Dixon’s theme, one thinks: time itself, that we’re running out of it. In “Said,” indeed, Dixon manages to tell a story in a satirically bright ultra-shorthand that thrives on the omission of all that’s conventional and thus unnecessary (“He said, she said. She left the room, he followed her. He said, she said. She locked herself in the bathroom, he slammed the door with his fists. He said. She said nothing . . . “). And he tries to do the same also in “Grace Called,” about a man (one of many here) whose life appears at first as sadly/hilariously empty as any Beckett clown’s: “Grace calls. I drink a glass of beer. I hang the mop over the bathtub. I cut my hair. Grace calls. I run in place. I eat a celery stick. . . .”

The rub comes when, time and again, Dixon lets such initially skillful, incisive, and suggestive stories wander off into the very conventions one supposes him to be taking courageous flight from: the quick-fix explanations of the standardized psychological-maudlin, for example (the man in “Grace Calls” ends up being traumatized by the death of a pet in his childhood), or the gratuitous tropes of having “something happen” (the fighting couple in “Said” end up in a taxi wreck).

Dixon’s austerely promising philosophical wit, in other words, shows all the signs of being ephemeral, brief, and, above all, easily lost sight of by its possessor, and the stories here--in its thunderous absence--remain often curiously trivial, sluggishly flat, and banal. In “Buddy,” a man walks through his neighborhood meeting people he knows; in “A Friend’s Death,” another pallid and lonely man gets a terminal disease, then dies; in “In Time,” a man is imprisoned for eight years by two old ladies, then is let go; in “The Postcard,” a man tells his wife about his eccentric and unsavory relatives; in the gag--and shtick-filled “Dog Days,” two men get bitten by a transvestite’s dog,which then can’t be located for a rabies check.

The growing and disheartening suspicion that Dixon is in fact writing about nearly nothing intensifies with those stories that are about the writer writing. “A Sloppy Story” is the animated-cartoon-paced tale of a writer selling a story idea (“This guy comes in and says to me and I say to him and he says . . . “) to a producer whose company then goes bankrupt. The ambiguity of Dixon’s title (the sale takes place on a rainy day) comes to seem an attempt to head off anticipated criticism (that it’s a “slapdash story”) through a disclaimer of the come-on-this-is-just-a-bauble-so-don’t-take-it-so-seriously variety. Which is fair enough, except that Dixon plays the same card--lightheartedly admitting his own deficiencies--too often for it to keep working as an anodyne or charming sop to the less-than-infinitely-patient reader-critic.

“I stopped writing that last sentence because it was getting confusing,” says the writer in “Magna . . . Reading.” (Then go back and rewrite it, says the critic.) The self-appointed task of this nameless character is to finish writing another story (He’s already got “two-fifty to three hundred of them”) before Magna, who is reading downstairs, “finishes the other four.” So: “Fill up this page, go right on to another. How many pages more will it take to make a story, go right on to another, have one ready for her. . . .”

And is Dixon, too, writing just to write? Writing just to fill pages? In “The Last,” a writer talks about his “biggest manuscript” and says: “Been working at this so long I forget what I do, why I do it, when I did it.” What can an increasingly bored and by now slightly infuriated reader say to such a shameless, narcissistic, logorrheic wearing of the writely heart on the writely sleeve? Yet on goes the heedless and unstoppable Dixon. In the title story, a high school teacher, who loses his girl, says of himself: “I often say . . . things simply because I think they might or do sound metaphysically comical or epistemologically profound or just plain bright or yuk yuk funny and she’ll enjoy my company more for my having said them than if I hadn’t or some such stuff.”

Beckett’s sea of words was an ocean of crafted and conscious drowning; Dixon’s is mainly filler and foam.