Lennon, Brian. "Slouching Towards the Muse." Review of Western Electric by Don Zancanella and Hints of His Mortality by David Borofka. The Boston Book Review 4.1 (January/February 1997): 50.
Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.
The John Simmons and Iowa Short Fiction Awards are given annually for a first collection of stories. Past winners include Enid Shomer (Imaginary Men), Michael Pritchett (The Venus Tree), and Abby Frucht (Fruit of the Month). The 1996 awards, judged by Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love), go to Don Zancanella, a Wyoming native teaching at the University of New Mexico, and David Borofka, who teaches at Kings River Community College in Reedley, California.
At their best, Don Zancanella's stories are perfect miniatures---abrupt, precise, and lucid episodes that situate a crisis, hint at repercussions, and softly drop away. They are unostentatiously multi-layered, with the elegant metaphorical reach of poetry, a kind of low-key coaxing of the abstract from the literal. In "Disarmament," a woman living alone on the edge of the Wyoming prairie is courted---to her gradually waning disgust---by an Air Force captain assigned to the maintenance of vacant missile silos. "Nativity," the story of a young Native American trapped in the cultural and religious vortices of a ménage à trois with a Catholic Anglo couple, delicately stratifies the concepts of identity and origin. Both of these stories bear a more or less magnificently quiet subtlety; one might hardly ask for anything more in the minimalist short form.
In many ways, David Borofka's sensibilities align him with a more or less pugilistic confessional strain of masculine U.S. American postwar novelism, highlighted by some of the works of Saul Bellow, Walker Percy, and Richard Ford. Borofka's fictional alter egos are theologically fluent atheists, incapable of faith, obsessed with their own failings, and driven by a desire to admit sin that is equal parts ironical and sincere. They are men who commit adultery, seemingly against their will, are thrown out of the house by their wives, and then more or less slouch around, mooning over their expulsion as though it were some extraordinary injustice. Inclined to daydreaming and tokenistic sexual fantasy, they suffer from a pathological romanticism, a kind of "life is elsewhere" syndrome, that leaves happiness impossible and resignation the last word.
In one way or another, all of these stories are meditations on social and romantic infidelity (or rather, on the impossibility of fidelity). Men, here, share a deep desire to become someone other than themselves: "But there are those unpredictable moments, when a voice breathes the word Tahiti into his ear, when he imagines himself as Gauguin." When that doesn't happen, they tend to take it out on the (real or fantasized) women in their lives. Female characters, in these stories, will answer the door wearing garters, vacuum the house in the nude, and contemplate Brueghel's Netherlandish Proverbs with a tantalizingly knowing air---all activities, of course, that everyman's everywoman pursues every day, which makes it hard to see why these marriages are so disappointing (and disappointed). Under the pressure of such fantasy, the boyfriend or husband's droll middle-class mid-lifer's sense of humor---part wisdom, part suicidal foolishness---yields sometimes to a bitterness manifest in cynical generalization and occasionally vicious scorn. Thus women, here, find themselves on the receiving end of such epithets as "irrational" and "dim"---not least for the gullibility of their own desire:
No Lothario exactly, he had discovered the method for his own brand of seduction---the fact that women liked to hear him confess these flaws of character; they liked to think that they could heal him in some way, that they could convince him that he wasn't really so lost, that they could help him find some peace within himself.
But surely, he is mistaken. Be that as it may: now and then, Borofka composes a truly exquisite story. "A Blessing," for example, is a perspicacious rendering of a (relatively content) couple's chosen childlessness, totally devoid of such posture---one of the few pieces in this collection that does not invite hypermasculinist identification. Another such example, in which masculine foibles are treated as the socialized foibles they are (no more, no less), is the story sequence "The Summers of My Sex." This is a marvel of subtlety and understatement, told rather believably from a child's perspective (something quite difficult to do). When he resists the temptation to existentialize and so luxuriate in his male characters' more or less misogynistic longings for death, Borofka both conceives and writes short stories very well. If in his less successful work, here, he seems determined to communicate a sense of spiritual desolation to which he's unable to lend any weight, that may reflect the critical exhaustion, today, of the pitiably self-pitying feminized-masculine novelistic ego, for whom fiction writing might be said to be something of a proxy for gender war.
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