There's a certain smell to old money in Louisville, Kentucky. It's the aroma of horses and bourbon, and the sweat of young men who prefer basketball to football and seek comfort in the arms of any warm body. Dwight Allen comes from Louisville, and his short-story collection The Green Suit distills the scent of passion and regret that clings to upper-class Kentuckians into 11 tales, most narrated by the weak-willed, lustful, layabout oldest son of one prominent family. Peter Sackrider dabbles in magazine editing and fiction writing, much like Allen, who spent a decade in the offices of The New Yorker. But The Green Suit isn't a strict roman a clef, an idea Allen subtly mocks in his story "Not Renata," which has a character contradicting the fictionalized version of herself that appears in another of the volume's chapters. That sort of postmodern play differs from the collection's remainder, which tends to be direct and descriptive rather than coy. A typical Allen line concerns itself with freezing moments and examining buried meanings, as in this apt description of an Episcopal prayer book: "The thin pages release a sweet, genteel smell, like ardor sublimated." Most of The Green Suit reflects this plainness of style and vision; like a Southern Gothic version of Raymond Carver, Allen magnifies the small, painful incidents of everyday life, paying special attention to their comic absurdity. When he clicks, the results are marvelous. In "The Hazletts' Dog," Sackrider returns to Louisville to take care of his injured mother; as he revives a boyhood love triangle with a cantankerous friend and his aloof wife, he finds that, as it was years before, he's more of a spectator than a player. In "Succor," he keeps bumping into a sloppy, unemployed rascal who's like a middle-aged version of himself, and when the rascal shows up at his house, it's as if all of Sackrider's sins and failings have come home. These stories and a few others are starkly funny, with devastating finales. At other times, Allen's penchant for abrupt endings and characters who refuse to communicate leads to sterile stories that creak with fiction. Mostly, the fine outweighs the rough, as Allen captures the minor discoveries of self that accumulate into what resembles a life for people with nothing but money and time to do the searching.