Playing Out of the Deep Woods: Stories

With varying degrees of success, Hawkes's second collection of stories explores everything from golf to Peeping Toms to an absurd Alice in Wonderland-like trial during the Vietnam War. Imaginative ideas share these tales with credible characters: The title story, for instance, depicts two golfing couples who venture into a thicket after lost balls. In the dark tangle, each character is faced with either nightmare or fantasy before staggering back onto the manicured green or disappearing forever. ``He'd been a machine inside a machine, ordered, perfect, but now the wail escaped him again and rose up into the branches.'' Hawkes frets at the line between private, emotional chaos and the public, controlled world. He nimbly treads this edge again in ``Peeper,'' in which seeing through a voyeur's eyes is made inviting and his actions forgivable. Other particularly insightful stories are ``Mutiny,'' about an aging man's bravado, and ``Always Cold,'' which tells of a freak accident and a social death. A few of the tales, however, suffer from poor pacing and unravel either too slowly or too mechanically. For example, ``The Shortest Hole'' (not unlike a damaged version of Roald Dahl's ``Parson's Pleasure'') too predictably records an obsessed man's ruination and reads like an exercise rather than a living story. At worst, Hawkes's fables make nice vignettes, but more often they linger on. (Mar.)