The tales accumulated in The outcomes of Desire describe a latest city society in its notable complexity, its usually obvious absence of fastened values, and its resistance to effortless understanding.

In "Counting Mercedes-Benzes," Marshall is a directionless younger guy who believes he can get away his mom and dad' Beverly Hills way of life by way of marrying for romance. He fails to achieve, in spite of the fact that, that the girl he thinks he loves, his mother's Hispanic maid Geneveva, has little in universal with the individual he imagines her to be.

The identify tale issues a company attorney who used to be an intensive at Berkeley within the sixties. accidentally he runs into his lover from that point and discovers how a ways the 2 have traveled within the intervening years. In "Lost in Rancho Mirage," Denton is a tender guy who may perhaps "have been identifying up rubbish or digging ditches if his grandfather hadn't left his (Denton's) father a section of actual property that grew to become out to be without delay within the course of a freeway". He needs to come to phrases with the truth that he can by no means absolutely own his attractive female friend: "The imaginary sun bathing Jill, he learned, was once a microcosm of an international during which she might regularly be the guts; he may consistently be status a bit off, in a shadow, the place he belonged".

The have to triumph over fact usually turns into an obsession for those characters. In "Space and Light," an architect's attention former protege has passed him either financially and artistically activates him to try whatever fully unique for the 1st time, a undertaking that leads him down an inexorable route to insanity, to a darkness from which there's actually no break out. In "The woman Detective," Justine's unhappiness over her first sexual adventure is juxtaposed to her resentment at being born a lady. To her, being a lady capability "always desirous to be anything varied, another person, not able to simply accept the proof that a few of her acquaintances looked as if it would examine, amazingly, a stroke of the maximum fortune." within the aftermath of her quit to ardour at the grass of the municipal golfing path, she indulges her infantile delusion of being a personal eye--"not Nancy Drew yet Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, even the virulent, violent Mike Hammer."

Set normally in California, those tales painting a global the place desires come into clash with truth, the place conception fills the distance among fact and fiction, common sense and emotion, fable and disaster.