Reviewed by Jessica Allen
8.3.07

Prior to retiring in 1994, Leonard Michaels taught in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His most popular course covered autobiographical narratives, from Augustine to Rousseau and Montaigne. He could have, but didn’t, teach his own novel, Sylvia, first published in 1992 and recently reissued as a slender companion to the fat Collected Stories.

Sylvia slightly fictionalizes the story of Michaels’s meeting and calamitous marriage to his first wife, Sylvia Bloch. As the novel opens, the unnamed protagonist has returned to his parents’ Lower East Side apartment after spending a few years in graduate school at both the University of Michigan and Berkeley. It’s 1960. He’s twenty-seven, “overspecialized,” with a vague desire to write stories. Meeting the exotic Sylvia Bloch at a friend’s apartment solves “the question of what to do with [his] life . . . for the next four years.”

Within a week, the narrator spontaneously moves to Cambridge to be with Sylvia while she studies at Harvard. One day Sylvia arrives home in great pain, having chosen to walk several miles with a nail sticking into her foot, rather than stopping to remove her broken sandal. Horrified, the narrator realizes that Sylvia might be suffering from some sort of psychosis. The two move back to New York, where they begin a cycle of screaming fights followed by violent lovemaking. “From unreal to real was how it felt,” the narrator explains. At one point, after he has gone to visit his parents for the day, Sylvia calls to say she has slit her wrists. He rushes back, finding that her superficial wounds haven’t damaged her appetite: she eats the gefilte fish he has brought. This episode demonstrates not only Sylvia’s jealousy and capacity for melodrama, but also the narrator’s detachment from his wife’s problems.

Today we’d very quickly diagnose Sylvia with bipolar disorder and, perhaps, schizophrenia. We’d blame her disease(s) on genetic predisposition coupled with trauma suffered after her parents died, orphaning her at a young age. Lastly we might point to societal factors that contributed to her distress: the repressive 1950s made it difficult for a woman to express either her intelligence or her sexuality. But the narrator did not have these ready diagnoses available to him; instead, he surreptitiously chronicles their life in a secret journal, reproduced and sprinkled throughout the novel:

Sylvia looks in the mirror and dreams about lovers as she cuts her hair. She worries about pimples, pains, and pregnancy, and she worries about what everyone thinks of her; and she spends a lot of time sleeping, or lying about eating candy and frosted rolls, complaining of pains. Occasionally, she will show me affection. She went on today about her periods, how much of her life has bled away.

Lacking the vocabulary to analyze what’s wrong with his wife, he fixates on her menstrual cycle, which has led some readers to label the novel as misogynist. After all, the young man didn’t write the novel; an older, far more mature author, with a personal investment in positively portraying the narrator, wrote it a few decades later. Nevertheless, Sylvia does some horrible things, including throwing his typewriter at his head, and he stays with her out of a sense of moral obligation: “I liked myself for liking her.”

Writers and editors revere Michaels for his sentences. And, ultimately, these sentences—with their rhythms and descriptions—are the best parts of Sylvia. At night, says the narrator, Manhattan descends into a “stunned, fetid slumber. It had been deeply used.” Sylvia’s lips have a “luscious expectancy.” About a friend, the narrator states, “The university hadn’t made his feelings thin and literary.” The new editions of his work, four years after his death in 2003, are meant to introduce Michaels to a wider readership than he found in his lifetime: he definitely deserves one.