No Reason on Earth: A Short Story Collection

The world, in this first collection of nine stories, seems an utterly desolate placea place of imposing landscapes and seascapes finely rendered where nothing is connected with anything else. Even the people are isolated, from each other, from themselves. It is the landscape of the spirit in the 1970s, where the anguish of Vietnam goes on forever and the nuclear cloud darkens the scene. In the opening story, ""Another Kind of Nostalgia,'' a man is stoned on drugs, demented, disfigured by acnea catalogue of physical and emotional disabilities. Characters in other tales are confused and reeling, adrift, caught in some perpetual postadolescent crisis that eludes definition. Motives are indiscernible, just as personality, which persistently eludes focus, remains ``opaque.'' A man, for no observable reason, shoots himself, his wife, his infant daughter, two friends. No one thinks to ask why; the fact is simply reported, like the weather. Haake's territory is a chilling, joyless one; in evoking it, she demonstrates that she is an impressively talented writer. (June 15)