Fear Of Blue Skies. - Review - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by Andrew Weinstein

FEAR OF BLUE SKIES by Richard Burgin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. 184 pages. $19.95.

Reading a story by Richard Burgin is a little like taking a long-distance bus ride thigh-to-thigh with a weird and talkative stranger. Little by little, the character's compulsions and loneliness emerge against a landscape of La-Z-Boy recliners, desolate basketball courts, and massive postwar apartment complexes in places identified as Boston, Saint Louis, or Philadelphia--but that could be anywhere. With the 11 probing stories in Fear of Blue Skies, Burgin explores the haunting terrain of creature comforts and emotional isolation that he staked out in his earlier unforgettable collections, Man Without Memory and Private Fame. Burgin country is stark, and its suffering inhabitants are smart and exceptionally sensitive men and women, mostly in their thirties and forties. Frustrated by languishing careers; trapped in troubled relationships with elderly parents, lovers and friends; or utterly alone, Burgin's characters strive to bring meaning to their empty lives. Witnessing their struggles is both compelling and thought provoking.

What makes these stories particularly rich is their cogency in linking the personal with the political. In two stories Burgin draws complex, compassionate profiles of people whose prejudice blinds them to opportunities for overcoming their own isolation. Still reeling from a divorce, the prim Doreen finds the eponymous male character in "Brook" too old and sexually aggressive for her. Her notions of propriety stand in the way of ending the harrowing loneliness she otherwise treats with sleeping pills and "massive doses of TV." "My Black Rachmaninoff," a masterpiece of a story, features another divorcee, a white lonely-heart bent on sloughing her "programmed" ideas about race. Yet, despite her good-faith efforts, Paula's race consciousness dictates her life--even in bed with an African American lover, when she tries "not to stare at his penis, thinking that it would be kind of a racist thing to do." Recognizing one's problems, Burgin suggests, is a far cry from overcoming them. Ruminating upon those shortcomings only leaves some characters chewed up inside--and just as lonely as ever. After a disappointing singles' mixer, two men in "Mistakes" reflect over drinks on their failures with women. The fastidious narrator was too picky; his perfectionist friend was too self-critical. With remarkable delicacy, Burgin shows two straight men virtually flirting with each other, in spite (or maybe because) of the heterosexual tone of their conversation.

The author suggests that our own worst enemies are ourselves--while family, friends, and lovers are tied for a close second. Years of awkwardness estrange Dan and Daneen, adult siblings in "My Sister's House," a poignant story in which the revelation about the characters' deceased father's sexual abuse provides an opportunity for reconciliation. And internecine patterns dominate relations between Steven and his elderly mother in "The Towel," until a crisis shatters that routine. To be sure, it's the changing terms of relationships that offer a possibility of redemption. In "Barry and Elliott," mental illness transforms the glamorous Barry into a dependent of his envious friend Elliot, whose own frustrating life is consequently "redeemed for a moment and crowned with meaning." Other protagonists, left with nothing but memories of troubled relationships, have still a harder time coping. Tormented by nightmares, some struggle to replace an absent mother or father's love. In "The Park," dramatic visions of his deceased parents guide Vince on a tortuous path toward emotional fulfillment. And a needy young Martin in the title story is tormented by his father's neglect with nightmares of rising "balloon-like, higher and higher into the sky ... [until] he began to become transparent." He roots himself by naively trying to rescue prostitutes.

By contrast, needy characters whom nobody needs slip over the edge, like the browbeaten husband in "Ghost Parks," the humiliated writer in "Mercury," and the downsized banker in "Bodysurfing," who feels as if he is "a thousand years old." They are cautionary tales about the violence that can occur when social connections are shorn, as they so often are in contemporary America.

With its range of perspectives and its conversational first- and third-person narratives revealing smart and compassionate men and women, Fear of Blue Skies is a masterly collection--sociologically provocative and psychologically profound. Together with his previous Pushcart-Prize-winning fiction, Burgin's latest achievement comprises a most impressive body of work. Burgin's disturbing voice is unique in contemporary American literature.

ANDREW WEINSTEIN New York University