The Consequences of Desire. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1994 by Ron Tanner

By this time next century, academics may look back at the late twentieth century as a curious era in American literary history, for never has the number of Americans trying their hands at writing short stories been greater. American magazines, big and small, are backlogged with submissions, and every other student in America's graduate writing programs - which continue to proliferate like mice in a well-stocked pantry - dreams of making it to the bestseller list. It seems inevitable, given the rise in writerly activity, that we see a commensurate rise in the amount of competent published writing. And it seems only reasonable to assume that contents such as the University of Georgia's annual competition for a short story collection - awarding the Flannery O'Connor prize - should represent the apex of such efforts. It was with much eagerness, then, that I opened Dennis Hathaway's The Consequences of Desire, the 1992 winner of this award.

I was struck immediately by Hathaway's keen eye for detail. He is at his best when he makes physical particulars serve a thematic aim, such as underscoring the ugliness of the character's surroundings with an ironically pretty touch in "Besame, Besame," in which a tile-setter's stucco mixer "sputtered and rocked, its paddles churning stucco that in a semiliquid state was a bright apricot color." Hathaway is adept also at allowing us vivid glimpses of his characters' emotional moments, as in "Lost in Rancho Mirage," when the main character's "passion began to leak like air from a punctured tire." By the time I had finished the third story in the collection, however, I grew worried, because while Hathaway was offering some lines that were technically pleasing, he was not offering much else.

There is an oppressive sameness to these stories, for instance. After reading two or three, the reader knows very well what to expect: the consequence of desire is disappointment - Hathaway's characters always leave empty-handed, their hearts hollowed out by longing, their lives messier than ever. Consider the close of the title story, in which two ex-lovers - who happen to meet after 21 yeas apart - abandon the one-night affair they are about to consummate. It was their hope that the affair would somehow relieve them of their predictable and disappointing lives, but ultimately the prospect of sex with a near-stranger, they decide, is too complicated, too depressing. As the woman prepares to leave the man's room, she shakes out her dress, "trying to reanimate it," but it remains "without form, empty, suggestive neither of the past nor the future, of nothing at all."

What such stories amount to is a chronicle of misery unredeemed by any illumination of hope or understanding. This would not be so said if we had a reason to care for these people. Unfortunately, with perhaps one exception (Justine in "The Girl Detective"), Hathaway's characters are unpleasant company. Most of these 11 stories are about men who feel cast adrift and desperate to make a change. And most of these men are dissatisfied with their mates, whom they find intolerably shallow and often downright stupid. Through their eyes we see women portrayed as petulant airheads, like Maddy in "The Apocryphal Story," vacuous ice-queens, like Jill in "Lost in Rancho Mirage," or flat-out bitches, like Carol in "The Night of Love." The men themselves are either intolerant, condescending, and sometimes cruel - like David, the cold-blooded lawyer in the title story, who makes no effort to understand his now-frumpy ex-lover and the pain he caused her so long ago - or they are simply self-destructive, like Marshal in "Counting Mercedes Benzes," longing for affairs with the kind of women they meet only in their dreams. If the women of Hathaway's world are better that the men realize, Hathaway never lets on; and if these men are their own worst enemies, as Hathaway suggests, then the world is a very bleak place indeed, for nothing is good enough for them and nothing good comes of their longing.

The blurb on the dust jacket boasts that these stories "describe a modern urban society in its extraordinary complexity, its often apparent absence of fixed values, and its resistance to easy understanding." Frankly, we can stand on the street corner and get that much, if that is all we ask of our writers. There are so many competent writers in America today, producing so much competent writing, that publishers need to demand more than competence - more, in Hathaway's case, than technical skill and a handful of quirky characters. Ideally, a press has something to say through the writers it publishes; it doesn't act merely as a drain for whatever rains into it. It is with great disappointment, then, that I suggest we ignore books like The Consequences of Desire. While the writer may craft some fine lines, ultimately he achieves nothing much of consequence.