SOJOURNS IN FRIENDSHIP, SOLITUDE, SILENCE

Author: By Alyson Hagy

Date: SUNDAY, August 16, 1998

Page: E2

Section: Books

Surveyor
``Surveyor'' is set in the stark and arid desert of northern New Mexico, a landscape Hawkes re-creates with precision and unbarred affection. Paul Suope and John Merline, Korean War veterans, have been in the desert for nearly 30 years. Ostensibly, they are surveying vast territories for a dubious and uncommunicative foundation that deposits regular paychecks yet never claims its painstakingly created maps. In fact, Paul and John are constructing a skewed, though fulfilling, life apart from the material excesses of America. Paul, the narrator of the novel, notes that ``our futures were married by the Chinese mortar round'' that blew the military ambulance he was driving off the road. The two wounded GIs recuperate together -- though John suffers the loss of a leg -- then drift into ``a strange friendship, without the usual borders,'' a conjugality without sex. It is a bond that suits them both until the arrival of some demanding outsiders.

Caliope is a film student determined to build a false-fronted Western village -- complete with hitching posts and saloons -- just where the winter rains will topple it for the benefit of her camera. There is a ``production,'' she claims, ``in catastrophe.'' If her single-minded, scantily-clad appearance weren't enough, a cadre of scientists, the Dinosaur Men, also storms the barricade of bachelor isolation, forcing the housemates to evaluate their interlocking lives as they never have before. Neither man is easily rattled -- they have seen much strangeness together; they have touched the wreckage of UFOs, communed with half-mad ranchers, navigated blind, underground rivers -- but these twin disruptions launch John toward new, individual targets of desire (a prosthetic leg and a matronly, suburban girlfriend) while Paul remains baffled and, to his mind, left behind.

Paul is an engineer and does not believe he has the resources to cope with change. Yet he finds solidity in narration, his ``archaeology of myself.'' His accounting is by turns hilarious, cranky, and instinctively generous. Caliope's postmodern artistry and the Dinosuar Men's stubborn, acquisitive science give Paul plenty to measure himself against. So does John's defection to a padded recliner and the wonders of satellite TV. Hawkes does a splendid job of delineating the spidery bonds of brotherly love. His prose is spare, yet large-hearted, and it is difficult not to be charmed, and inspired, by the travails of this odd couple of the mesas. ``Surveyor'' is a deft comic novel that is remarkably fresh in its delineations of friendship and the contradictory lures of the hermetic West.

Semaphore
``Semaphore'' is a riskier book, tinged by tragedy. The story of Joseph Carl Taft, a boy who is both mute and capable of knowing the future, ``Semaphore'' explores Hawkes's concerns with isolation from a stark and fearful angle. Joseph is a child ``whose beginnings had their endings planted in him.'' When he foresees the circumstances of his sister's death, he becomes a literal ``prisoner of the future,'' a boy who cannot alleviate his worries by weaving a safety net of words.

Unlike ``Surveyor,'' ``Semaphore'' is set in a generalized landscape in an unnamed Carolina town. The trappings of the novel are very usual. Suburban neighborhoods are springing up all around the Taft home, and in fact, Joseph's greatest passion is for the tracks and dozers that so quickly remake the world around him. But this love for earth-moving, for man-powered change, spares Joseph nothing. Though he desperately tries to save his sister from the fate he's seen, he fails, and this heartbreaking failure triggers a spiraling reassessment of what it means to be cut off from the comforts of speech and explanation.

Joseph's visionary gift attracts some queerly assertive characters in the persons of the loquacious Reverend Roy and a psychiatrist named Higgerby. Roy is large, black, bold, and unafraid of preaching his version of spiritual wholeness to anyone who will listen. Higgerby wants to mentally dissect Joseph, to analyze the muteness that has no apparent physical cause. When he suggests that Joseph is a kind of Cassandra, a prophet to whom the doomed will never listen, Joseph begins to wrestle with his gift (which has also brought true love into his life) as if it is the blackest of angels. With Roy and Higgerby, pronouncing men who dash on and off the page, Hawkes is willing to tilt the novel toward a gnarled eccentricity. It may be that Joseph has actual access to God; he may be the pioneer for a future that will substitute one sort of ability (seeing versions of what is to come) for another (the ability to speak).

The questions Hawkes raises are oblique and intriguing, but though his treatment of Joseph, his long-suffering parents, and his vivid wife, Luce, is warmly poignant, the novel is less of a piece than ``Surveyor.'' There is so much at play in ``Semaphore'' -- the limits of love, the significance of life, the defeat of fear -- that the novel's characters are sometimes overshadowed by Hawkes's sober search for meaning.

G. W. Hawkes, who codirects the writing progrsam at Lycoming College, is the author of two previous collections of stories, ``Spies in the Blue Smoke'' and ``Playing Out of the Deep Woods,'' and his skills at the short form have made the transition to his novels. The writing is plaintive and without pretension. Hawkes knows his business here, and his business is to answer Paul Suope's compelling question, a query that ought to be surveyed in our own minds more often. ``What are we,'' Paul asks, ``but the sum of our relationships, the interstices of our triangulation points?''