Reading the first few paragraphs of “City Boy,” one of the best stories in Leonard Michaels’s debut collection “Going Places” (1969), it is hard to escape a sense of déjà vu. A young Jewish man, frenetically and guiltily seducing a Jewish girl; his envy and resentment of her rich family, whose Park Avenue apartment is full of Vlamincks and Utrillos; her weak father and her domineering mother, waiting to pounce in the next room — isn’t this the world of “Goodbye, Columbus”? Didn’t Michaels know that this particular brew of class and sex and religion was patented, a decade earlier, by Philip Roth?

Keep reading, however, and you’ll soon realize that Michaels did know it, with a vengeance. Mr. Roth might have dreamed up the scene where Mr. Cohen literally stumbles across his daughter having sex in the dark, and then chases her lover around the room, as his wife cries out, “Morris, if something broke you’ll rot for a month.” But then the story’s narrator — who is actually named Phillip — decides to make his escape, in the nude, by walking on his hands into the elevator, hoping that the doorman will think that his pubic hair is a beard (“Beards were fashionable”); and suddenly you’re in Leonard Michaels territory. Slapstick, even the neurotic slapstick of Mr. Roth, is too tame for Michaels’s dark vision. In his fiction, bodies are not just teased by sex; they are mocked and distorted, as savagely as in a Bosch triptych.

We hear the true Michaels note when Phillip walks naked down the “spit-mottled” steps of the subway, and thinks: “I had hoped for vomit. Spit is no challenge for bare feet. Still, I wouldn’t complain. It was sufficiently disgusting to make me live in spirit.” This is not the voice of a comedian, but of a moralist, who submerges himself in the world’s degradation so that his opinion of the world can be more bitterly confirmed. “The Collected Stories” (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 403 pages, $26) makes clear that Michaels was really a kind of Biblical prophet, whose denunciations were thinly disguised as avant garde fiction. In particular, the two books that made his name — “Going Places” and its sequel, “I Would Have Saved Them If I Could” (1975), both included in full in “The Collected Stories” — constitute a scathing indictment of the 1960s. No one has done more than Michaels to make the summer of love look like a circle of hell.

That is why some of Michaels’s most desperate stories have to do with parties — the kind of drunken, druggy, orgiastic parties where the Dionysian spirit of the 1960s came into its own. But where the party, for a traditional novelist, serves as a narrative pivot — a moment when the destinies of characters intersect — Michaels’s parties are narrative voids, random and meaningless. “The hall was clogged with bodies; none of them hers, but who could be sure?” runs the first sentence of “Making Changes.” The narrator keeps trying to extract his girlfriend, Cecily, from the tangle of an orgy. But his efforts are mocked by the conversation of a grotesquely overcivilized couple, who insist that the orgy is an oasis of freedom:

“Not like conventional sex, sneaking in corners, undermining human society, selfish, acquisitive, dirty. I mean every time one gets laid, it’s conservative politics, don’t you think? On the other hand, orgies are liberal, humane. The ambience of impulse, the deluge of sensation, why orgies are corporate form, the highest expression of our catholicity, our modern escape from constrictive, compulsive, unilinear simplifications of medieval sex. Don’t you think?”

Michaels’s only answer to that question lies in the description that follows: “A pulsing hole went by.” For Michaels, this reduction of the individual soul to the anonymous body partakes of the demonic. And the heroes of his stories — who are all really the same man, the author, under a series of unmistakably Jewish names — are plagued by their inability to take pleasure in the liberation going on all around them. They too are guests at the orgy, and they are constantly having sex; but sex, the way Michaels writes about it, is a form of combat. “I leaped up and came down on her. She clung. She gnawed my neck, nibbled, licked, squeezed. … Her fingers and toes worked into me like worms, coiling around tendons and bones.” This grotesque style comes to feel like Michaels’s vengeance on himself and his world — a world that doesn’t deserve the dignity of realism, but must be degraded in language the way it degrades itself in practice. The more outlandishly transgressive Michaels’s writing becomes, the more intensely the reader senses his nostalgia for the humane: “Life is this epitome. Red, tidal maw. Yawn. Aching exfoliant. Hole.”

Michaels’s first two books, which made his reputation and still sustain it, take up a little less than half of “The Collected Stories.” In 1981 he published his first novel, “The Men’s Club,” which he then helped to turn into a movie. His second novel, “Sylvia,” which tells the story of his miserable early marriage and his wife’s suicide, appeared in 1992. (A new paperback edition of “Sylvia” is being published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux to accompany “The Collected Stories,” and a new edition of “The Men’s Club” is scheduled for next year.)

In the meantime, Michaels did not do much with the short story form, and the middle section of “The Collected Stories” reflects his weaker work of the 1980s and ’90s. His 1990 book “Shuffle,” which combined fiction and nonfiction, is represented by “Journal,” a selection of anecdotes and aphorisms. It contains some powerful passages — “We should say ‘going,’ not ‘coming,'” Michaels writes, with typical sexual bleakness — but the “Journal” does not have the shape of fiction, and it does not seem to belong in a “Collected Stories.” Then come four stories published in the 1990s, in which Michaels’s obstreperous talent seems bullied into submission by his experience of working in Hollywood. “Honeymoon,” a tale of jealousy set in a Catskills resort, is familiar and sentimental, while “Viva La Tropicana,” a farrago about Jewish gangsters and Cuban spies, is almost a parody of a Hollywood pitch — “The Godfather Part Two” meets “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

It is a happy surprise, then, to turn to the last section of the book, “The Nachman Stories” — a series of linked tales about a mathematician named Nachman, which Michaels was writing before he died. These seven stories are Michaels’s best work in a quarter-century, and show that he had tapped a rich new vein. The wrenched, anguished prose of his early work is gone, but so is the slickness of his middle period. In their place is a wry, meditative style, reminiscent of Bernard Malamud, and a new kind of wisdom.

For the first time, in Nachman, Michaels invents a character who is not obsessed by sex. On the contrary, the middle-aged math professor “was frugal by nature, and had not lust to consume the world.” Instead, he takes small bites of experience and ruminates on them. In “Nachman from Los Angeles,” Nachman agrees to write a paper on metaphysics for the rich, handsome Prince Ali, who can’t graduate from UCLA without it. But when Ali tries to impress Nachman with displays of wealth and sexual prowess, he responds by procrastinating, proving that the intellectual possesses a treasure that even money can’t buy.

Nachman’s ability to find the beauty in Henri Bergson’s time-philosophy, Michaels convinces us, is at least as gratifying as Ali’s ability to lavish thousands of dollars on a dinner. Again, when Nachman attends a math conference and spots an error in his rival’s proof, his ambivalent response — should he expose the mistake publicly, or be content with his own insights? — makes genuine drama out of the life of the mind. For a writer who had already made such fireworks out of the ordeals of the body, this is an especially impressive achievement; and it allows “The Collected Stories,” despite its unevenness, to end on a note of triumph.

akirsch@nysun.com