THE CLIFF WALK: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found.<i> By Don J. Snyder</i> .<i> Little, Brown & Co.: 272 pp., $23.95</i>

A few pages into “The Cliff Walk” we find author Don J. Snyder with a paint roller in his hand, toiling in a stranger’s home, acidly musing to himself that “people like me are falling. Falling hard.” His people, we are meant to understand, are white-collar people who had every reason to expect they would make a very good living--and life--using their well-trained intellects. Shaken loose in the Great Re-Engineering of the ‘90s, many of them are only now coming to rest in job niches--shelf stocking, data entering, house painting--they never dreamed of inhabiting.

All this falling has produced, paradoxically, a rising market for the inside story promised in Snyder’s subtitle, the secret to “a job lost and a life found.” The slip-sliding throngs want to hear from one of their own: How does it feel to plummet so far so fast? How do you survive impact at bottom? And, perhaps most important, what fresh perspective, moral and political, do you take away from your crash landing? Snyder’s answers are maddeningly incomplete and his tale has the untrustworthy feel of a calculated sermon masquerading as unvarnished memoir.

Still, “The Cliff Walk” keeps your attention. The trick lies in Snyder’s telling, and why shouldn’t he be good at it? His dead-end profession, after all, was that of English professor. Fortysomething, married with three young kids, he is shooting for tenure at prestigious Colgate University in Maine when the boss hands him a pink slip. Nothing personal, we’re told, just cutbacks.

The news sends Snyder swooning through various stages of grief, recounted in self-lacerating detail. First: denial, as he hides the firing from his wife, Colleen. Then, having told her, more denial as he moves his family into a big summer house and waits for an “even better” job. When dozens of rejections arrive instead, he buries them at the bottom of an old golf bag and wallows in delusions of Hollywood martyrdom, imagining himself the noble, wronged teacher played by Robin Williams in “The Dead Poets Society.”

Next comes irrational compensation: Laid-off Dad keeps splurging on family gifts, which Mom quietly returns. Before long, Snyder is one of those ever-multiplying, middle-aged, hollow-eyed mall walkers. Browsing in Victoria’s Secret, he fantasizes that the pretty clerk, feeling his pain, projects a sexually charged sympathy. Standing in line at McDonald’s, he’s a muttering crank, unsteady on his feet. Wandering into a park, he tries to catch something of his youth by shagging fly balls, but he keeps dropping them.

Down, down, down go Snyder’s pride and prospects. As the rejection slips pour in--40, 50, 60--he is forced to beg a friend for a job selling textbooks, only to be told he’s too old, too accomplished. When he visits a former student who was driven to a nervous breakdown by a soulless bank job, you have to wonder if this isn’t a review of Snyder’s own impending madness. How low can he go? Well, try this. He schemes, unbeknownst to pregnant Colleen, to sell his unborn child. “All I’m going to do is find out how much they’d pay,” he rationalizes on the way to a secret appointment with potential adopters.

The tragicomic turning point finally arrives when we find Snyder crouched under golf course shrubbery with his young son Jack, the two of them whiling away the day by stealing balls from the putting green, an act of rebellion that struck me as refreshing after Snyder’s long, irrational sleepwalk. “Jack and I were Indian warriors returning to claim the land that white men had taken from us,” Snyder writes of their invented game. “Jack and me against the people in charge of things in this country, inheritors of power and privilege. . . . After a lifetime of trying to please these people it was pure fun to mess up their golf game.”

The immediate detail of such vignettes makes “The Cliff Walk” work well as a kind of Fired Everyman’s tale writ a bit large. But clearly Snyder wants to be read at a level more grandiose, one that, say, St. Augustine intended for his “Confessions.” Snyder is offering his entire life, from blue-collar kid to white-collar wannabe, as a parable of moral transformation. Unfortunately, whenever he strays from the particulars and into parable, his own confessions ring, if not hollow, shallow.

Take, for example, the way Snyder quells his own golf course rebellion. In a burst of chastened altruism, he changes the game--he and Jack start helping the fat cat duffers by secretly moving their balls closer to the pin. Next thing you know, Snyder is gratefully taking a low-paying job at the course as a groundskeeper. Embodied in this little episode is an all-American conundrum unconsciously permeating the entire book: our natural envy of the rich and powerful and our Puritan-rooted guilt over feeling that envy.

The mainstream urge to shush class complaints leaves it to alienated voices from the margins--from Pat Buchanan to gangsta rappers--to tell us the emperor has no clothes. But there’s nothing ill-mannered in declaring that because America’s class divide is widening, those dumped by the new economy have every right to be angry and to make the winners feel their heat. After all, it is not random fate but powerful interests who redistribute wealth and opportunity in the United States via tax law, labor rules, trade treaties, education funding and entitlements.

Too bad, then, that no analysis intrudes upon Snyder’s personal drama. The only macro view is voiced by a broke businessman who tells him, “AT&T; lays off 40,000 workers and its stock goes up! Do you know what this means?” It’s the right question, and he provides the right answer: “It means the covenant has been broken.” But the businessman’s wild anger and criminal advice (he tells Snyder to lie on credit forms, run up huge bills and walk away from them) fatally undercut his authority.

Snyder’s own target of scorn, strangely, ends up being his former self, “a modern man on the make” and, even more strangely, the white-collar work he once dared to covet. He feels sudden shame for his teenage ambition to leave behind his working-class roots. He’s embarrassed that sports scholarships and power schmoozing helped propel him into the professional ranks. He considers his teaching days fraudulent careerism and so tosses his marked-up volumes into a bonfire.

He makes reference several times to what the white-collar world gave him: a salary “that enabled us to live like royalty,” a “safe and privileged life,” “more money, more security, more status, more respect.” But what about the work itself, the life of the mind, the sense of competence, the role in public discourse that many an English professor and lots of other white-collar Americans have known? Snyder hasn’t anything good to say about that: Therefore, he can’t--or won’t--speak to a legitimate pain endured by many an intellectual worker deprived of her or his calling. He says nothing of the hole in the heart left after worthy work is snatched away.

To have addressed that collective tragedy, Snyder would have had to veer from his neater construct: the story of one man’s salvation from too much ego and “desire.” The guru in this quest becomes his wife Colleen, whom Snyder paints in the gauzy tones of a Zen mother. She’s the one who put a stop to Snyder’s class-warfare pranks on the golf course, telling Snyder, “Such a waste of time. You don’t want [Jack] to grow up and be one of those people who can never be content with what he has inside him. Someone who makes himself hate what these people have here in order to keep from wanting it.”

Our protagonist meets his final, purifying trial by fire in the freezing cold. In the dead of a Maine winter, he lands a manual labor job with a team building a lavish vacation home. His blue-collar mentors are patient with his soft, clumsy hands, and he gradually finds new resolve, new self-respect, a new trade as a self-employed handyman. “Best of all I found that I could hold my kids without feeling that I had cast them into darkness, and I could look at my wife without feeling she would be better off with another man.”

By this late point in “The Cliff Walk,” the telling feels very much the product of an English teacher turned carpenter, so well sanded are the vignettes, so tightly do they fit into a finished whole--too smoothly finished, in fact. For all his homage paid to the lessons of sweat labor, Snyder fails to acknowledge that he’s also been using those old white-collar skills to write this book. Nor does the reader learn that, as reported recently in the Internet magazine, Salon, Snyder is today working, once again, in a college classroom. Meanwhile, Colgate University has tenured other English professors after Snyder, which makes one wonder whether he has the right to preach on behalf of real victims of today’s slash-and-burn downsizing, or whether he was something less universal and more old-fashioned: just a lousy case for tenure.

Such hanging questions, if addressed squarely and honestly, might have prevented Snyder from proudly pounding one last moralizing nail into his parable of “a life found.” We see him risk his health stuffing asbestos insulation for a wealthy client. Snyder has asked for $15 an hour. “I won’t work for less than a living wage when I’m working for rich people,” he tells the man, but then, desperate for the cash, settles for $7.50 an hour. After he performs the task well, his pleased client offers him more work demanding greater skill. This time Snyder holds out for $18 an hour and gets it.

This is surely meant to be, after so much “falling hard,” an uplifting moment of self-worth realized. But I couldn’t shake that sinking feeling as I saw Snyder romanticizing the predicament of the newly downwardly mobile, each, like him, negotiating from isolated weakness, each swallowing their bitterness rather than channeling it en masse into political change.

“I won’t work for less than a living wage when I’m working for rich people” might be their refrain. Blue-collar unions, when they were powerful, used to make that same demand on behalf of millions who understood their fates to be linked, millions who hoped that a fair deal wrested from the bosses today might make it possible, someday, for their children to join white-collar America. Maybe, through hard honest work, they’d even become college professors.