The Consequences of Desire

by Dennis Hathaway

Overview

The stories collected in The Consequences of Desire describe a modern urban society in its extraordinary complexity, its often apparent absence of fixed values, and its resistance to easy understanding.

In "Counting Mercedes-Benzes," Marshall is a directionless young man who believes he can escape his parents' Beverly Hills lifestyle by marrying for love. He fails to realize, however, that the woman he thinks he loves, his mother's Hispanic maid Geneveva, has little in common with the person he imagines her to be.

The title story concerns a corporate lawyer who was a radical at Berkeley in the sixties. By chance he runs into his lover from that time and discovers how far the two have traveled in the intervening years. In "Lost in Rancho Mirage," Denton is a young man who might "have been picking up garbage or digging ditches if his grandfather hadn't left his (Denton's) father a piece of real estate that turned out to be directly in the path of a freeway". He must come to terms with the fact that he can never fully possess his beautiful girlfriend: "The imaginary sunlight bathing Jill, he realized, was a microcosm of a world in which she would always be the center; he would always be standing a little off, in a shadow, where he belonged".

The need to overcome reality often becomes an obsession for these characters. In "Space and Light," an architect's realization that a former protege has surpassed him both financially and artistically prompts him to attempt something wholly original for the first time, a project that leads him down an inexorable path to madness, to a darkness from which there is literally no escape. In "The Girl Detective," Justine's disappointment over her first sexual experience is juxtaposed to her resentment at being born a girl. To her, being a girl means "always wanting to be something different, someone else, unable to accept the facts that some of her friends seemed to consider, amazingly, a stroke of the utmost fortune." In the aftermath of her surrender to passion on the grass of the municipal golf course, she indulges her childish fantasy of being a private eye--"not Nancy Drew but Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, even the virulent, violent Mike Hammer."

Set mainly in California, these stories portray a world where dreams come into conflict with reality, where perception fills the space between truth and fiction, logic and emotion, fantasy and disaster.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820342948
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	01/01/1993
Series:	Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

A native of Iowa, Dennis Hathaway has worked as a building contractor, a construction worker, and a newspaper reporter. The Consequences of Desire is his first published collection of short stories.

Editorial Reviews

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.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The riskiness of self-delusion is the major theme binding this collection of short stories. But it is also bound by an aimless, almost futile quality and an abundance of curiously comical similes that repeatedly jar. Although the author's style is highly imaginative, his originality is diminished by his lack of restraint in detailed passages that frequently tell much more than they show. For the reader, the unfortunate outcome is not anticipation but induced impatience. In addition, the author's tendency to overstate lends a self-conscious tone to his stories that often makes it difficult to separate his voice from those of his characters. Still, when a little wry humor breaks through, the result can be pleasing, as in ``Lost in Rancho Mirage,'' a mild, satirical piece that works well. Recommended for Hathaway fans.-- Janet Wilson Reit, Univ. of Vermont Lib., Burlington

Library Journal

A winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Hathaway is attuned to the vast distances between people even as they share a bed, a conversation, or a drink. He takes exact measurements of the chasm between fancy and fact, fears and longings, the mundaneness of reality and the tempting illogic of fantasy. In the title story, two lovers run into each other after a separation of 20 years and experience a dislocating surge of desire and repulsion, nostalgia and embarrassment. Inappropriate love is the theme of "Counting Mercedes-Benzes" and "Lost in Rancho Mirage." In the first tale, a well-off but vapid young man falls in love with his mother's Hispanic maid but is easily scared off by predictable complications. The second story dissects the inertia that spawns an unhappy lust between a real estate developer and a pretty, self-obsessed young woman still bruised from losing custody of her daughter. A building contractor as well as a writer, Hathaway deftly incorporates his knowledge of the trade into "Space and Light," a fine evocation of emotional disintegration. These are perceptive, enticing, and complexly structured stories that illuminate the gap between thought and communication, the void between wealth or beauty and spiritual clarity.

Donna Seaman

"In his strongest fiction, Hathaway reminds us how hard it is to build anything of which to be proud, anything that lasts—a house, or a family, or a sense of self-worth.”--Washington Post

"Hathaway is attuned to the vast distances between people even as they share a bed, a conversation, or a drink. He takes exact measurements of the chasm between fancy and fact, fears and longings, the mundaneness of reality and the tempting illogic of fantasy . . . These are perceptive, enticing, and complexly structured stories that illuminate the gap between thought and communication, the void between wealth or beauty and spiritual clarity." -Booklist

From the Publisher

In his strongest fiction, Hathaway reminds us how hard it is to build anything of which to be proud, anything that lasts—a house, or a family, or a sense of self-worth.

Washington Post

Hathaway is attuned to the vast distances between people even as they share a bed, a conversation, or a drink. He takes exact measurements of the chasm between fancy and fact, fears and longings, the mundaneness of reality and the tempting illogic of fantasy . . . These are perceptive, enticing, and complexly structured stories that illuminate the gap between thought and communication, the void between wealth or beauty and spiritual clarity.

Booklist