David Borofka took the MFA in fiction writing at UA in the ’80s and has made the program proud, with two novels, three short story collections, and several significant prizes. In earlier work, most of the characters are younger people, trying to grow up, courting, mating, marrying, divorcing.
These stories in “The Bliss of Your Attention” are quieter, more leisurely, insightful, and thoroughly engaging. There is ONE 5-page story: the rest are 25, 61, 30, 28, 47, and 23. The longer ones, the 61 and the 47, approach novellas. Although Henry James would certainly approve, these days publishers are reluctant to publish stories AT ALL, never mind at this length. Hats off to the Johns Hopkins Press.
The characters here, as you might expect, are middle-aged, and life has not been unalloyed bliss. Several of the men are determined but unsuccessful writers. The volume might have been titled: “Portraits of the middle-aged artist manque.”
The first story, “Domestic Arrangements: Live with It,” is told from the wife’s point of view.
“Learn to live with your disappointments. That is what I tell Alan, my newly retired middle school English teacher and my would-be-novelist husband.” She is not a fan of Joseph Campbell’s advice: follow your bliss. “I mean that’s where bliss leads you if you’re no good at the thing that makes you happy.”
This woman, a preacher, and her fiercely tenacious fiction writer husband, live together, more or less happily, for many years. He has, it seems, a heart attack and in the hospital learns he has finally sold a story. It’s not much, but it’s something.
Several are told from the husband’s point of view. You never saw more determined, relentless keyboard pounders. There are, ironically some results. In “My Fresno Book of Death and Disposal” the narrator has written boxes full of second-rate stories partly based on his crazy neighbors. They are meant to be serious, tragic even. But his sometime wife Jeanine reads them and finds them ridiculous and hilarious.
A media-savvy woman, she arranges for them to be sold to Hollywood. In television, she tells him, there are no readings, author photos or dust jackets, just loads and loads of money. His schlock sells and the show is streaming.
The artist in “Maybe” is an actor, not a writer, but is just as hapless. Of average talent, he works steadily in repertory theatre but ages out of leading man parts, and then color- and gender-blind casting ruins his career entirely. ”Prospero was a woman. Portia was trans.” He finds work pretending to be a sommelier in a wine tasting venue.
He and his woman, after many false starts and disappointments, are reunited and the story ends in an homage to “The Sun Also Rises.”
Julia says: “Why shouldn’t we be happy?”
He replies: “Wouldn’t it be funny …if that was true?”
