As the title suggests, hindsight permeates Pete Duval's short-story collection Rear View. In these dozen stories, characters are always casting nervous glances in a metaphorical car mirror, checking the surrounding traffic and gauging the distances they've traveled down life's highway.

In the collection's opening story, "Impala," that highway is a literal one as Roy and Maysle Potts head south on the interstate toward New Orleans in a borrowed convertible. Roy hopes to recapture the Mardi Gras exuberance of his college days, Maysle wonders whether or not she should tell her husband that she's gone into menopause; but as the silences stretch like miles between the couple, they both know their journey is a futile one: I'm forty- two years old, he thought. Jesus Christ, what the hell have I been up to for twenty years?

That epiphany could be injected into nearly every one of the other stories in Rear View, a collection that's alternately bleak and optimistic (though, granted, much of that optimism is forced). Selected as this year's winner of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize, Rear View tiptoes into Raymond Carver territory (what bleakly optimistic fiction doesn't?), but then quietly stakes out its own parcel of land.

Duval pulls us into the lives of his characters by filling the book with closely observed details -- like a church full of parishioners who murmur Mass "like furniture being moved around on another floor of the building" ("Midnight Mass") or the hush of a nursing home, TV volume on low: Jeopardy! ended in a whisper of applause, and the drums and trumpets of the evening news filled the room ("Wheatback").

The author writes about "a world coiled mean-tight and waiting to go off in your face if things got too good" in "Something Like Shame." Wives berate husbands with the cold snap of icicles in their voice, bakery workers get hands caught in machinery, short-tempered bullies brawl in a hospital emergency room. For these characters -- predominantly men -- it's a hard life lived in trailer parks, bars, barbershops, burnt-out factory towns and, in the best of the bunch, an industrial bakery. Their collars are blue, their beer is warm and their sex is passionless.

Like another of Duval's literary forefathers, Andre Dubus, the stories are also streaked with occasional flashes of redemption as lapsed Catholics seek out the solace of the confessional. Rear View closes with "Pious Objects," in which an aging priest hears the confession of a man responsible for a box of Virgin Mary statues being dumped in the river. The man's spiritual agony over the tossed-out icons causes the priest to reflect on the simpler days of his youth, a relatively uncomplicated world that now seemed to have vanished forever. The priest gives the man his penance; but after he leaves, the burden remains: For hours the heaviness stayed with him. It was evening before Father Gaston emerged from the curtained stall of the confessional, long after he had sent the other man out into the world with a clear conscience.

Each of Duval's characters is weighed down by something -- unrequited love, faded dreams, alcoholism, dying parents -- and even though lip service is given to the redemption of religion, people like the narrator of "Scissors" can never truly be happy in their circumstances: I was sitting in Renny St. Cyr's barbershop, looking out at the textile mills across the highway and the big clock without hands. I hadn't been home to New Bedford in years. But I was out of work. My wife had left me. I had no savings, and at the age of thirty- one no choice but to move in with my mother until -- her words -- "something turned up."

As interesting as these down-and-depressed characters are, Rear View doesn't always live up to its early promise. Some of the stories are, frankly, flat as beer left out overnight, and the collection would have benefited by the author or his editors dropping stories such as "Welcome Wagon," a vignette featuring a volatile character from another, better story; or "Fun With Mammals," which finds the narrator baby-sitting for a narwhal strapped to a flatbed heading north toward Canada. At times, Duval doesn't trust his writing enough not to shove epiphanies down our throats.

However, when he's relaxed and running at full throttle -- as in "Bakery," "Impala," "Pious Objects" and the title story -- Duval is able to get under the grimy fingernails of working-class Americans and capture exactly what it is about contemporary life that drives us to distraction, drink and depression.

Rear View is a confident, hard-muscled debut from a writer who knows how to handle the wheel even while flicking glances up at the mirror where all those miles recede behind us. ( )