BOOK REVIEW : A Mournful Collection of 11 Short Stories : THE CONSEQUENCES OF DESIRE by Dennis Hathaway . University of Georgia Press;$19.95; 264 pages

Sometime during the last decade, the short story seems to have become a mournful medium, the form of choice for rue, woe and wistfulness. This winner of the 1992 Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction is no exception. Reading these 11 stories is a stroll down the boulevard of broken dreams, a series of disconcerting encounters with disillusion, misunderstanding, disappointment and outright despair.

In the title story, a successful lawyer meets the woman who had been his lover when they were both undergraduate radicals at Berkeley. Twenty-odd years have changed them both, though in her case the alterations are merely superficial.

Boyd Carroll is still an idealist, though her youthful exuberance is slightly frayed. Looking at David over a table in a coffee shop, “She decided . . . that his life had been a glide of contentment and satisfaction, while her own . . . had consisted of bumps and ruts.” His beard is gone, the jeans and sandals replaced by impeccable tailoring.

Against her better judgment, she agrees to spend the afternoon and night with him, an impulse that turns to gall when he runs into a colleague at the hotel and pretends not to know her.

“Space and Light” is far darker in mood. When the architect-protagonist of this story meets a man who had once been his draftsman, the contrast between his former employee’s dramatic success and his own dreary routine overwhelms him.

In their brief conversation, Paul Westerley feels that the younger man is about to offer him disdained and rejected commissions. Though Westerly interrupts before any such explicit suggestion can be made, the resentment lingers. Westerley insults a difficult client, fires his bewildered assistant and announces that he’s retiring in order to work on private projects.

Energized by this decision, he tears down a wall of his house in order to build a studio. Rapidly becoming obsessed with the job for its own sake, he loses sight of the original objective and creates a windowless bunker into which he retreats, literally driven mad by professional jealousy.

“Counting Mercedes-Benzes” is a lighter shade of gray; the protagonist more ludicrous than tragic.

In this broadly satiric story, an aimless college drop-out imagines himself in love with his mother’s Latina housekeeper. To expedite the romance, he listens to Spanish-language tapes in his car and fantasizes proposing marriage.

After his mother flatly informs him that Geneveva is already married and a mother, “he saw Geneveva’s eyes, black and inward looking, but he turned the radio up loud and the image did not persist, it faded into the dim and irrelevant past.”

“The Night of Love” deals with a central theme of contemporary short fiction: the dissolution of a relationship between a man and woman, a relationship that never seems to have been much more than a temporary way station for both.

In the course of this fragile California story, the author manages to comment tartly upon real estate values, feminist cliches and the tenuous nature of emotional connection. Abandoned by his erstwhile lover, Anderson sits on the deck of the house they’d shared, laughing “the laughter of irony, of absurdity; like the lovemaking that had suffused the hills that night, it was something meant only to dismiss, to eliminate, to banish the terror of what can never be known.”

Like several of the other stories, “Sawtelle” is set in Los Angeles, but this time the subjects are the laborers who stand about the lumberyards hoping for a day’s work on a construction site.

Charles is an electrical contractor who picks up two of the men for a temporary job, then returns them to the corner. “He had no idea where such men lived. And he wouldn’t have known how to ask this question,” but somehow or other, their lives have not only touched his but have put his own problems into perspective.

Here Hathaway’s satiric tone is replaced by genuine empathy for his characters, making “Sawtelle” one of the most affecting stories of this debut collection. The detached observer has become the involved participant, a change in attitude that might be explained by the author’s experience as a construction worker and building contractor.

Here, concentrating upon issues seldom explored by his contemporaries, Hathaway’s gifts seem most impressive.