Reviewed by Joan Motyka
8.3.07

Reading this collection of Leonard Michaels’s stories is much like listening closely to the lush evolutionary songwriting of Paul Simon or reading the poetry of Marge Piercy. The youthful cocky exuberance of Michaels’s early work— Going Places (1969) and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975)—gives way to a more generous but still playful spirit in the final Nachman stories, collected here for the first time. Read chronologically, this collection portrays a changing internal landscape within a changed world, far from Michaels’s Polish Jewish immigrant experience on the Lower East Side although not touching the post 9/11 American angst. At his death in 2003, as he was completing a volume of the Nachman stories after years in Italy, the world was no longer as clear as the black-and-white portrayals in the early stories. Indeed, the title of one of the seven Nachman stories—“Of Mystery There is No End”—could well umbrella the entire Nachman collection.

Michaels, who died of lymphoma at the age of seventy, has long been regarded as a master of the short story, a writer’s writer. His work may finally reach a new expanded audience through this collection and another, Sylvia. His “memoirs-in fiction” about his first wife, Sylvia Bloch, who committed suicide, is being simultaneously reissued by Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Much of his writing has a grab-you-by-the-throat quality. Swaggering sentences, especially in the early work, seem thrust from knifepoint to page, landing with a breath-taking, often-shocking oomph. Consider the descriptions: Tulip, a woman in “Making Changes” whose voice “flew around like pots and pans,” or Joyce Wolf, in “Reflections of a Wild Kid”: “a hundred thirty five pounds of shank and dazzle” who was five foot seven but “walked seven foot five, a Jewish girl passing for Jewish in tough financial circles.” There is the rat-a-tat writing (“I yell sleep. It comes like a taxicab” from “Hello Jack”) and the one-line zingers. (“We faced each other like men accidentally met in hell,” from “City Boy,” describing Veronica’s father and Phillip as the father finds the couple, naked, on his rug.)

The satisfaction in this collection comes from the rich, exuberant sometimes antic language. But it comes, too, from its sharp portrayal of the arc from 1940s immigrant New York to late 20th century California, where Michaels taught for twenty-five years at Berkeley. Michaels, who spoke only Yiddish in his early years, grew up on the Lower East Side of New York, and adds his voice to a genre already richly populated by the likes of Philip Roth and Grace Paley and other early 20th century urban Jewish writers such as Bernard Malamud. Michaels portrays a neighborhood where boys answer to names like Tomato, Tito, Monkey and Beans (“The Deal”) and where “your father cries out in his sleep” because he “was born in Europe” (“I Would Have Saved Them if I Could”). In these gritty settings, a stomach “churned like the back of a garbage truck” (“Fingers and Toes”). Perhaps his best-known passage from this period, from the oft-anthologized story “Murderers” is : “My family came from Poland, then never went anywhere until they had heart attacks. The consummation of years in one neighborhood: a black Cadillac, corpse inside.”

This dark European-immigrant world view plays out not just on stoops and in hot apartments but in Catskill resorts too, which “weren’t polite society, and conversation could be blunt and cruel” in “Honeymoon”. In that story are immigrants at rest: “Guests looked serious in the dining room, as if they had come to eat what life denied them—power, brains, beauty, love, wealth—in the form of borscht, boiled beef, chopped liver, sour cream, etc.”

Michaels leavens this darkness with often-antic writing, such as his description of Phillip walking naked upside down in “City Boy”. But more often, the escape from this tough and stifling immigrant world is sex. There is sex in halls and closets and bathrooms (“Making Changes”), on the floor while parents sleep (“City Boy”), on the crowded IRT (“Getting Lucky”). Sex, particularly in the early bawdy testosterone-driven stories, is urgent, usually without love. (“Sex in one place. Feeling in another,” from “Journal”; more typically: “We had sexual intercourse. I wasn’t gentle” from “Eating Out”.) Michaels, it seems, rarely knows what to do with women other than have sex with them. And then there is rape. In the collection’s first story, “Manikin,” a young woman is raped by a fellow student and afterwards, still in the car with her rapist, passes a shop window: “She saw an armless, naked manikin and felt like that, or like a thalidomide baby, all torso and short circuited.” Later the rapist’s eyes “lingered in her nerves, like birds screaming;” and she commits suicide. Only in “Murderers,” where a group of boys watch a playful rabbi and his wife of many wigs have rapturous sex is there any sense that physical love brings the heart joy; the story, of course, ends in death and banishment.

Michaels’ conflicts between men and women are all raw, driven by some unknown, unexamined male force. “Women are tough,” says an entry in “Journal,” from Shuffle (1990). “They know what they want. Men know more or less what they need, which is only what they like, not even what they need. King Lear wails, ‘But for true need…’ then can’t define it. That’s a real man.” With Phillip, in “City Boy,” you can almost see the curling snarled lip: “In a crisis you discover everything. Then it’s too late. Know yourself, indeed. You need a crisis every day.”

By the Nachman stories at the collection’s end, the main character is a distinguished, albeit solitary, 50ish mathematician living in California who solves numerical problems; the emotional ones leave him more baffled. Although Nachman finds deepest peace alone, he is more generous-spirited and less self-obsessed—certainly less reckless—than the younger men portrayed in the early stories. Nachman worries about his friend Norbert, who has an unfaithful wife, and, in “Cryptology,” he is concerned, even, for the feelings of strangers. He has a “compulsion to make things right.”

This solitary mathematician, who goes only by one name, “couldn’t remember anyone ever using his first name, not even his mother.” (“Nachman at the Races”) He tries to understand the world’s complexity; in “Of Mystery There Is No End,” he examines relationships (“Boundaries are crucial to the integrity of relationships”), notably friendship (“Nachman loved his friend Norbert and would sooner cut off his own arm than hurt him”). But he remains an observer, sometimes a stranger, in his own internal landscape. Urged by his friend Adele, for example, to examine his feelings, Nachman “didn’t care to know too much about what he felt. After all, as soon as you know what you feel, you feel something else.”

If he is mellower and kinder to others, including women, than the bad boys of Michaels’ early stories, Nachman is, like them, no candidate for psychotherapy. “Nachman wasn’t against examining life, but then what was a life?” the final story, “Cryptology,” asks. Life, Nachman concludes, “was what you read about in newspaper obituaries. The history of a person come and gone.” That was why mathematics drew him so powerfully: “Numbers have no history. For history something has to disappear. Numbers remain.”

Fortunately for us, these sharp wonderfully written stories remain.