Past masters - postwar Jewish writers

ArtForum, Nov, 1997 by James Marcus

Among the Jewish heavy-hitters of postwar literature, Bernard Malamud always seemed a less flashy item - neither as diabolically brainy as Bellow, nor blessed with Roth's genius for autobiographical caricature. When it came to the short story, however, Malamud was superior to both. His Complete Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35) is an impossibly rich lode of language and human understanding, which runs the gamut from early naturalism to the Yiddish-accented magic realism of his middle period to late-breaking alloys of fact and fiction. The masterpieces are here: "The Magic Barrel" and "Angel. Levine" and "The Silver Crown." But even the slighter pieces are packed with Malamud's brand of verbal felicity. And even the superficially comic ones are undergirded by melancholy, as the author puts one contemporary Job after another through the wringer. "Upon him," he writes of one character, "suffering was largely wasted. It went nowhere, into nothing: into more suffering." In Malamud's case, fortunately, it went into art.

It's too early to grant Deborah Eisenberg Old Master (or Old Mistress) status - indeed, compared to Malamud's wisdom, her stuff can sound a touch callow. But All Around Atlantis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23), her third collection, shows a writer in superb control of her own eccentricities. All the familiar Eisenberg trademarks are present: the loopy, audio-verite dialogue, the vivid physical description, and the odd and unerringly exact metaphor. (Note, for example, the way "a blaze of triumph and contempt crackled behind the veneer of patently suspect humility" on one character's face, or the appearance of another's hair, "thick, glossy, dark gold, like something with a lot of calories.") As always, she's not someone you want to pick up for a quick fix - small doses make her seem too mannered. But if you really immerse yourself in a story like the plaintive "Rosie Gets a Soul," you'll find your imaginative metabolism slowly adjusting itself to the author's, until all the sensations and sentiments appear to be your own.

Eisenberg is a close-focus artist: the sparks in her stories jump from each noun, verb, or article to the adjacent one. Lee Smith, whose latest collection is News of the Spirit (Putnam, $23.95), is more of a classic storyteller, operating out of a Southern tradition of back-porch or front-stoop utterance. This isn't to deny the obvious craft in Smith's work. Her sentences are crisply nipped and tucked, and she does wonders with the serial punchline: "Harold owned and ran the Trent Riverside Pharmacy until the day he dropped dead in his drugstore counting out antibiotic capsules for a high school girl. His mouth and his eyes were wide open, as if whatever he found on the other side surprised him mightily. I was sorry to see this, as Harold was not a man who liked surprises." Smith's prose retains a marked Southern accent without ever collapsing into drawling hokum. Still, it's her narrative expertise that accounts for the greatest pleasure: events unfold in sequences that are surprising at first and then rigorously logical.

The young Peter Ho Davies shows a similar storytelling flair in his debut, The Ugliest House in the World (Houghton Mifflin, $20). Unlike Smith, whose fiction seldom ventures north of the Mason-Dixon line, Davies' work is literally all over the map: this slim collection includes stories set in Wales, Malaysia, Africa, South America, and England. Nor is the author confined to a single generic territory. See "Relief," for example, in which he manages the unlikely feat of making flatulence the occasion for psychological and historical insight.

Yet he's also capable of an elegant, economical sobriety. (Consider the pallbearers at a child's funeral: "The coffin rides on their shoulders but each with his free hand holds it in place as if it were so light it might just float away.") And Davies' lengthy excursion into a slate-mining strike in turn-of-the-century Wales - which could have easily devolved into a kind of latter-day How Green Was My Valley - is as contemporary, and as moving, as any story I've read in years.

So much for the clean, well-lighted book. Janet Kauffman, who's published four previous works of fiction, deals more commonly in disjunction and narrative disarray, and her new collection, Characters On The Loose (Graywolf Press, $12.95 paper), is true to form. A piece like "The Ocean with Everything in It" starts with a typical left-field flourish: "Some animals don't cry out in pain. A dog with its leg in a trap walked around Detroit for two weeks, and people didn't hear anything." Yet six pages and innumerable pain-related details later, there's a story about conscience in front of you - or at least a story-shaped object with its own, recognizably human existence. From time to time the literary molecules fail to coalesce, and we're left with an assortment of glittering debris. Yet Kauffman's intelligence is everywhere on display, and as an added attraction there's "26 Acts in 26 Letters," a hot-and-heavy exercise in which twenty-six alphabetized characters engage in some, but not all, of the possible erotic combinations thereof.