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.
General
Imprint: |
University of Georgia Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
July 2008 |
First published: |
July 2008 |
Authors: |
Dennis Hathaway
|
Dimensions: |
216 x 140 x 14mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
240 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8203-3308-3 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
General & literary fiction >
Modern fiction
|
LSN: |
0-8203-3308-5 |
Barcode: |
9780820333083 |
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