But not perhaps not entirely. There are moments you might recognise in form if not content. Small riffs, characters that could have been plucked from a screenplay and realised as fiction between hardcovers. In 'Destiny', a nothing doing prizefighter gets caught up with some guys who know some guys, if you know what I mean. Or 'Cosma Minapolidan', wherein a hapless small-time mob in one part of the country decide to move to Minneapolis (described elsewhere as a place where "spit snaps and freezes before it hits the ground") because there, stands to reason, they can be a big mob. Or the title piece, about the downfall of an abusive weights and measures man. There's little bits of magic all over these.

Not that everything here is really a short story, by all reasonable definitions. Three, including 'Hector Berlioz, Private Investigator' and 'Johnnie Ga-Botz', are really radio plays realised on paper; 'The Old Boys' - a real shaggy dog spy story - is much the least successful. It's okay to do that, not least because it breaks up the form, but you do have to wonder, if they weren't by Coen, would many a publisher touch them?

In point of fact, what's best about this collection - where we get that, if you must, Barton Fink Feeling - are the stories that are least typical. His publishers would like to seat Coen's vernacular storytelling alongside Hammett and Chandler (it's really pastiche), and there are hints at, say, Runyan and even Pinter here and there. But they also draw comparison on the flap to Raymond Carver, and that's the laziest and least complementary thing anyone can ever do for a writer.

But now the caveat, because two of the pieces in this volume really do bear the weight. 'The Old Country', with its bittersweet reminiscences on a Jewish childhood, has incontestable bite, not least in it's summing up: "Some forget that darkness, and the silence, and the chaos inside. But, despite what the Scripture says, it will never be banished, for without it there would be no horror, no misery, and no childhood."

And better yet, 'The Boys', about a father's cross-country trip with his two clingy and indulged sons, is written with bile and economy: a diner that's never heard of omelettes is described as "like some preposterously banal episode of The Twilight Zone"; or how one of the kids is "clumsily hoisted" into the car, "like an effigy of Prince Charles on its way to Madame Tussaud's". It captures perfectly, particularly in its fadeout, the banal, seething horror of Carver's blue collar hell. For that alone - although it's very far from alone - Gates of Eden is recommended almost without reservation.