Three Thousand Dollars. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 29, 1989 by David Klinghoffer

It was no surprise that the death of Raymond Carver a year ago elicited confessions of his influence from a range of our youngest novelists and short-story writers. As Jay McInerney attested most recently, in The New York Times Book Review, for many writers of his generation, " encountering Carver's fiction early in the 1970s was a transforming experience perhaps comparable to discovering Hemingway's sentences in the Twenties." You might go further and say that among such young writers as have any sense of style at all, a pretty comprehensive division can be seen: between those who fancy themselves experimentalists-mostly pale young women writing pale imitations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez-and their opposites, the realists, the followers of Carver. Among these latter, David Lipsky now emerges as one of the freshest and most appealing.

Lipsky first attracted attention when this collection's title story, published originally in The New Yorker, appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1986, edited that year by, yes, Raymond Carver. In that story, as in most of the other ten collected in this book, you hear the melody of Carver's fiction. Not the lyrics, just the melody: the blunt, staccato sentences that manage to sound at once urgent and quietly conversational, sometimes even a little distracted, as if the author's words hadn't been written down at first, but spoken into a tape recorder.

Lipsky distinguishes himself, though, by the ways in which his fiction differs from Carver's. For Carver, literary realism meant writing about

Real People with Real Problems. Waitresses and traveling salesmen, trailer parks and hunting trips, divorce, unemployment, and alcoholism-lowrent tragedy, as he called it. Even his poetry-with titles like " Drinking while Driving" and "Looking for Work"-reflected this depressing pre-

occupation with Middle American grit. Lipsky's characters, on the other hand, go to Ivy League colleges, or have just graduated and gone on in search of good jobs in New York. Some vacation in the Hamptons, others have a place in Connecticut.

And so it is that one of the pleasures of David Lipsky-absent in Carver for most of his readers-is the pleasure of recognition. Again and again, reading Lipsky's stories is like

noticing, among the grainy faces in a news-photo street scene: yourself, a relative, a friend. In one such story, Garden," not long after fleeing graduate school for a tenement apartment on West 20th Street, 24-year-old Leonard watches as his friends succumb one by one to "intimations of mortality." One calls from California, certain, at 85 heartbeats per minute, that he is having a heart attack. Others worry about brain tumors, or a suspicious configuration of moles. Eventually, Leonard recalls a brief affair with a woman who had once slept with a male ballet dancer. Soon our protagonist decides he has AIDS, for proof of which he searches his body each morning. This is refreshing stuff. Lipsky may be the first writer of any kind to have published a comic story about AIDS.

What "Garden" does for the immediately post-college experience, other stories do for college itself. Lipsky captures certain campus types with

an attractive brutality. In " Lights" the narrator courts tall, slim, beautiful Judy, who begins most mornings by vomiting in the bathroom. " Like most intelligent women," Lipsky observes, "Judy had at one time in her life had an eating disorder."

From AIDS to fashionable bulimia, in fact, Lipsky's comic realism is at its most delightful as it raids the storehouse of his generation's most cherished pieties. His best college story is Relativity," the middle pages of which distill so much, and with such accuracy, about undergraduate life at Brown University that they balance dangerously on the edge of journalism. In this story, Ross Tifton, terrorized through most of his junior year by a crazed transfer student named Tom Creely, whom the administration refuses to restrain, comes to observe the degree to which the modern habit of seeing justice in injustice-and, conversely, injustice in nothing at all-has infected not just the Brown administrators but, at that university anyway, the whole of student culture. Black students on campus, for example,

had formed two umbrella organizations,

the Third World Coalition and the

Organization of United Mrican Peoples

(a boy Ross had known at Dalton was

president of the OUAP-he'd grown up

near Ross, on East 87th Street). They

were mostly concerned with the "Eurocentrism"

of Brown's curriculum. . . .

Ross visited the List Art Center to see a

show of early abstract art. Instead, in

the lobby, he saw a show of student

work entitled "Beauty Is in the Eye of

the Eurocentric Beholder." The paintings

were all of beautiful, powerful-looking

black women being squashed out of the

picture frame by pretty blond white girls

in frilly clothes. In one, Say What?, a

poor black girl in tribal dress stared

sufferingly out at the viewer from one

end of a long horizontal canvas, while at