The stories in Hints of His Mortality concern the
male of the species--bewildered, guilt-ridden characters, adrift in a
changing sea of roles and expectations. Although yearning for the
ideal, the perfect form, and that sense of divine connection suggested
by Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, they usually end up
settling for what seems the next best things: sex and
religion.
The amorous scrimmage of male and female is a
contest that leaves no one unmarked. There is Grimshaw of "The
Blue Cloak" whose reticent wife becomes most passionate upon the arrival
of overnight guests. Cunningham of “Reflected Music” whose forays
into sexuality result in more ambiguity than certainty. Frank, the
isolated janitor of “Strays,” whose desire for Connie, the girlfriend of
his newly deceased roommate, is fulfilled with less than satisfying
results.
There are the hapless ministers throughout this
collection as well, whose daily grind of professional piety leaves them,
in many cases with more questions than answers: the young Reverend
Anderson whose fall from the church roof leads him to tell his
congregants what he really thinks; the Episcopalian priest of “Epilogue”
who wonders why he wasn’t blessed with as much moral rectitude as his
brother who sells life insurance. And there are also those like
Father Oldham of “The Children’s Crusade” whose faith is marked by
madness as well as the sincerity of true conviction.
The men and boys of Hints of His Mortality
are never unaware of their flaws, for these are characters with the
capacity to register the shadows of their every blemish. Like
Ferguson of the title story, whose failures of conscience haunt him for
twenty years, each protagonist experiences the fallibility of his own
nature, agonizes over his own moral weakness, and longs for escape from
this life in which “our birth is but a sleep and a
forgetting.”
Amazon.com: Hints of His Mortality
(Iowa Short Fiction Award)
