Restless readers unenthused by characters talking about their penis size must wait until Rumble, Young Man, Rumble's fourth story for a clearing, but as the book progresses, its thematic sweep covers more than mere inches. Author Benjamin Cavell has been a boxer and an editor at The Harvard Crimson, and though his past signals part of his storytelling approach, his take on dude culture comes off as more searching than sly. All of Rumble's short stories focus on men in varying degrees of maleness, from boxers and trainers to politicians and traders. The lead character in "Balls, Balls, Balls" works at a sporting-goods store, when he's not at home injecting the steroids that make him, to his mind, the best paintball player in his nowhere suburban town. He's the kind of guy who wonders where other meatheads do their tanning, weaving unchecked vanity through the insecurity that suffuses most of Rumble's macho characters. In "All The Nights Of The World," a sheepish son takes his girlfriend to meet his football-star father. "Killing Time" delves into the warped dependency between a boxer and his sparring partner, while in "Evolution," two ennui-afflicted stock traders take a studied stroll down "the path to emotional detachment" to train for the murder they hope to commit out of sheer physical curiosity. Armed with clean, simple prose and ideas that seem gleaned from a reading of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Cavell gains in heart what he lacks in insight. None of his character sketches lead to real revelations or surprises, but he adds glimpses of tenderness to lugheads whose cartoonishness threatens to overwhelm. Dispensing advice on women, an old football player tells a cynical cohort, "When you're under the covers in the dark, either you're the only two people on earth or you aren't… That's all there is." It's a far cry from the surrounding ab-centered priorities and talk of anal sex, and it carries through to similarly conflicted personas like a speed-addled politician on the outs with his wife. One character rants that "the danger is to become all talk and no action," but Rumble also shows the danger in becoming all action and no talk. The book doesn't boast much range, but its straightforward tales course with the haunting hum of men fated to sublimation and the anger it breeds.