For anyone who may wonder what goes on in minds of 'men who lead lives of quiet desperation,' author David Borofka offers insights in his award-winning, finely wrought short story collection, 'The Hints of His Mortality.' Most of the stories draw the reader in by using a similar narrative device: men speaking of their lives, describing other people as if their identities are defined by their roles in men's lives--'my wife,' 'Grimshaw's wife,' 'Parker's sister-in-law,' 'Cunningham's father,' 'Scot's girlfriend,' 'his first wife.' Sometimes the protagonist is introduced by his last name only: 'The sun was setting when Anderson turned back toward the highway . . . '; 'Years later Ferguson would remember. . . .' (James Joyce used this technique in 'Eveline' in 'Dubliners': 'She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.') This style sets the tone for the storytelling; it compels a reader's need to know who is this person.

Thus, who might the 'His' be in 'Hints of His Mortality'? While all of the stories contain clues, the answer is found, first, in prefatory lines quoted from William Wordsworth's 'Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollection of Early Childhood'; second, it's revealed in the eponymous final story of this thematically interrelated collection: 'Years later Ferguson would remember-as the disabled 727 in which he was trapped as a passenger sank into the twilight of morning clouds-how his first wife had disappeared or died (he never knew which) in the fog of the Central Valley of California'; third, it's limned in 'Epilogue,' which is a final story about two brothers and a fateful encounter. Whose mortality? It's Ferguson's and Anderson's and that of the other men in these stories. As they reflect on their lives, and what they have made of them, the reader becomes a privileged party to what is going on their minds: their anxieties, their regrets, their recriminations, and their rationalizations.

Mr. Borofka is a fine writer. His writing is not always easy to read because it answers the perennial question that has been put to silent men: what are you thinking? 'Life is indeed a garden of pain, that men and women are born for trouble and heartache, and that lyricism of experience is nothing but a chimera of our most fraudulent desires?'

Borofka creates imaginative, beliveable characters and places them in a universal context, a young boy's coming of age. The story unfolds in Borofka's fluid prose, the events puntuated by flashbacks. The flashbacks depict a fascinating, sometimes supernatural, intricate web enmeshing all the characters up to the present. The vivid imagery and touching details of an eccentric group of poeple make the novel emotive, engrossing, and strikingly real.