The stories collected in "The Consequences of Desire" describe a modern urban society in its extraordinary complexity, its often apparent absence of fixed values, and its resistance to easy understanding.

In "Counting Mercedes-Benzes," Marshall is a directionless young man who believes he can escape his parents' Beverly Hills lifestyle by marrying for love. He fails to realize, however, that the woman he thinks he loves, his mother's Hispanic maid Geneveva, has little in common with the person he imagines her to be.

The title story concerns a corporate lawyer who was a radical at...