Spies in the Blue Smoke: Stories

Whether about friendships, love affairs or family bonds, the 13 tales in this debut collection demonstrate Hawkes's keen sense of how people come together, separate and, sometimes, struggle to regain feelings thought to have been lost forever. As though the author were taking a cue from a blues singer, stormy weather often sets events in motion and foreshadows the characters' responses to one another. The title story, for example, begins during a storm, when an old woman hallucinates that electricity is pouring out of her appliances. Placed in the best rest home money can buy, she realizes that her son is wealthy and belatedly resents him for her earlier forced penury. Yet the ``blue smoke'' of her medication does not deaden her perceptions so much as afford even graver revelations. ``Pioa'' defines a relationship of a different sort, that of an artist to his work. Andy Cropt, who moved to the South Seas a la Gauguin in order ``to rediscover with primary colors what men had lost,'' has become a full-time drinker and part-time cabbie but nevertheless paints one masterpiece. These are solid stories, measuring everpresent emotional needs in an increasingly mobile society. (May)