The Consequences of Desire: Stories

In these 11 stories by the 1992 winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, desire leads to frustration, loneliness and even madness. Unfortunately, the protagonists--young and middle-aged California men, teenage girls, a Mexican illegal immigrant--don't put up much of a fight for their unexceptional dreams of love, glory and success. Barring some flashes of futile rage, the men are eerily passive; the women, self-absorbed and beautiful, have a tendency to walk out on them. Cultural and linguistic barriers cause problems in several tales, but even those characters who nominally speak the same language fail to communicate. In one of the more dramatic stories, ``Space and Light,'' a cautious architect goes mad when confronted by a former colleagues's daring successes. The title story shows a man's adulterous lust for an old sweetheart, which she dispels by reminding him of how he deserted her 21 years earlier; the dreary mechanics of slipping unseen into a hotel room crush any remaining chance of intimacy. Despite some effective descriptive passages and Hathaway's good ear for vacuous dialogue, the cumulative effect of his debut collection is oppressive rather than tragic. (Dec.)