Some American men.

• Author: Schwartz, Amy E.

Some American Men. Gloria Emerson. Simon and Schuster, $17.95.Collecting information, said Mark Twain, is like collecting garb age: you must know what you are going to do with the stuff before you start rounding it up. The stuff of Gloria Emerson's book is in disparate chunks, seemingly drawn from unrelated projects, few of them suited to the arguments surrounding them.

There are reports on Vietnam--the war, the Thai refugee camps, the veterans, and Agent Orange victims-much of it related to her earlier work- Winners and Losers.

There are her interviews with the poor and her statistics on poverty, unemployment, and the depredations of Reaganomics. And she presents her gallery of profiles of American men, chosen, she tells us, "by chance or by design... .One conversation began in a grocery store in New Jersey when I asked a man I mistook for the manager where the dry mustard might be found." Among others, she talks with a laid-off auto worker in Ohio, a Princeton student with a workingclass background who plays in a rock band, a disgruntled New York Times Africa correspondent, and a consultant on "workplace deviance." Finally, and quite apart from the rest, are Emerson's own reflections on American manhood in a changing society.

The questions she asks in this vein are undeniably fascinating. How do men reconcile the old expectations with the new? How have they changed their views of women, money, and their daughters? What do machismo and the army mean to them now? But Emerson does not seem to have begun focusing on the themes until after she finished her reporting. The long profiles, works of keen and copious detail, imply a few vague answers. The interview subjects barely address the questions. Emerson blames this all too easily on the inability of men to "open up," a point she drives home by haranguing a Vietnam veteran: "You can't be made of ice. It's not wrong or shaming to be afraid."

Mostly, though, she relies for framework and transitions on a peculiar quasi-oracular narrative in which she generalizes and refers to the present in the past tense For instance, "That year [what year?] it was not unusual for American females to work for construction companies, be lawyers, deputy sheriffs, bus drivers. . . .Men stopped saying women were not good drivers, but when a couple was...