HINTS OF HIS MORALITY

A thematically unified and smartly arranged debut of 14 stories— one of those rare collections in which the sum is greater than its parts. Borofka's mostly male protagonists approach midlife with a sense of having failed—not just at their professions, or as husbands and fathers, but as decent men. Sex plays no little part in their guilt: The narrator of the fine title piece, a 38-year-old ``man without a conscience of his own,'' realizes that, even though he's survived a plane crash, it does not absolve him of his sins, especially his recent adultery. When a minister's pass at his secretary is rejected, he accepts an unrelated staph infection as divine punishment (``The Whole Lump''). In ``Prologue,'' an unfaithful husband, a failed writer turned insurance salesman, finally confesses to his angry wife. Some of Borofka's stories document scenes from the lives of men struggling to understand the opposite sex: In ``Reflected Music,'' a college student begins to understand ``the complications of intimacy''; in ``The Summers of My Sex,'' the narrator records scenes (unsexy ones) from his erotic development, many from summers spent with his mother's all-female family; and in ``Sisters,'' a narrator reflects on the women in his life: his wife and three daughters, the aunt who raised him, and the reckless mother who abandoned him. Borofka's moral vision includes matters of faith as well: Disillusioned ministers turn up in a number of stories. In ``The Girl on the Highway,'' a crisis of faith results from a young pastor's freak accident; in ``Epilogue,'' an Episcopal priest confesses his infidelity to his pragmatic brother. A typical liberal-secular couple in ``The Children's Crusade'' are bewildered by their daughter's religiosity after she's enrolled in a parochial school—a saintliness that's disrupted by her first period. Borofka steers artfully and intelligently through a variety of collisions of faith and sex, creating a memorable work and an exceptional debut.