rev. of Playing Out of the Deep Woods by G. W. Hawkes
by
Playing Out of the Deep Woods
Stories by G. W. Hawkes. Univ. of Missouri Press, $14.95 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron.
A conventional wisdom about short story collections these days is that they must feature stories that are linked in some way -- collections that focus on a particular series of characters, or a particular place, or a particular vision. But in G. W. Hawkes's second book of stories,
Playing Out of the Deep Woods, each story is its own world, unlinked to any other, and organic in its elegantly and originally revealed truths. In one story, a high-tech entity conducts global research on the unexplained emergence of blue triangles. In another, a nineteenth-century drifter faces down the superstitious inhabitants of Killisburne, Scotland.
In the title fiction, a foursome at the Married Couples Best Ball Tournament at Hollow Hills Country Club all lose their balls in the deep woods of the first hole. When each of the golfers ventures in after them, they discover strange and mysterious happenings -- the artifacts of a lost childhood, a dead mother, passion, tranquility, and the possibility of pregnancy. The woods contain "a darkness so complete it's romantic," and the three golfers who manage to play their way out are forever changed by their journey into them.
"Peeper" follows fifty years in the career of a peeping Tom, and Hawkes's accomplishment is to somehow make this character likable. We meet him as a fourth-grader, "a boy prophet, a boy spy, a boy soldier; he's a boy the world is going to have to reckon with." But by the end of this particular evening, "by the time it is full light, he has peeped three bedrooms, and he has found out already this early in his career that he likes to watch women dressing or undressing, but not naked." Ten years later, his peeping leads him out of the Korean War, and within the next twenty years, he is arrested one hundred fourteen times. In this story and in others, Hawkes never shies from excess, from exploring extremes in characters and in situations, and yet he is a subtle writer who paints his portraits with broad brush strokes and never appears to be exploiting such material for the sake of shock value.
Quieter stories, like "Mutiny," feature dramas of consciousness, where on the backdrop of a calm setting, the past rattles around in a character's head like "bells in the old brainbox," until a crucial truth rings out. Sir Quentin is a World War II hero who believes he has sired a coward for a son, until forty years later he learns that his own courage in the war was a product of a "doctor's lie, or ignorance, and that he was a brave man by mistake." This revelation cripples him, and he is faced with the first real test of his own courage. In most of Hawkes's stories, characters are tested with more than one crisis, and our intimacy with them is enriched.
Some of the stories function best as allegories. Told in a folksy voice, "Always Cold" occurs in Oracle, Kansas, a place so flat that "the sunlight skips across the town like a thrown rock." Ruth Montgomery is a victim of a vague accident, almost a curse. She becomes so shunned because of this suspicion that she grows invisible to the superstitious town, and eventually, by their will of wanting it so, she disappears altogether from the canvas of life. "The Moveable Hazard," one of three golf stories in this collection, follows a fearless American abroad to Scotland, where he seeks to ignore all the warnings and overcome a mythically dangerous par-five fourteenth hole. In a driving rainstorm, his caddie warns him that the hole's moving marsh "is to remind men of the border 'tween water an' land. Ye'll land in the muck o' the shore of it. Ye can nae miss it." The golfer's adventures are funny and mysterious, and you don't need to know anything about golf to enjoy reading them.
Throughout the collection, the stories are marked by deft, imagistic writing, and a voice filled with authority and humor.
Playing Out of the Deep Woods offers a rich range of storytelling, evidence of an author who repeats nothing, and holds nothing back.
Fred Leebron directs the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, Grand Street, Ploughshares,
and
elsewhere.