Burkah and Other Stories. - book reviews

Literary Review, Wntr, 1993 by Burton Raffel

Once upon a time, we all pretended to be One - One World, One Humanity, One Sex, one everything. Even when we knew we were pretending, we kept our mouths shut and our eyes averted, and did as our parents had done and by their doing had informed us that we had to do too.

Layle Silbert has one foot firmly planted in that vanished world; she knows its governing codes, but she also knows its utterly ungovernable aches and its small diurnal movements, its half automatic routines and its wandering, forever unfocussed yearnings. As the older woman-living-in-sin says to the younger woman, newly living-in-sin: "You don't need a marriage certificate to wash his underwear and his socks, to buy for two in the grocery store, to cook every night no matter how hard you worked all day in the shop." And the younger woman's answer is perfectly shaped: "Yes, yes, maybe." We can virtually feel the air of the 1930s, as we can readily pick up on the only-in-this-country-a-short-distance inflections; those of us will have lived in that world ourselves will remember, and those who have not will know precisely where they are.

But Silbert is living and writing in the '90s, and she has her other foot planted, equally firmly, in the newer reality, where biology may not be destiny but what is? Women are simply, unmagically women, in the '90s. "Poor Demetrius. To have found and lost what he wanted so dearly....Her camera was still hanging heavily from her neck. She gave the lens cap another friendly slap. The bus arrived. She waved goodbye....She forgot to look to see how long Demetrius stood on the sidewalk after she got inside or whether he had waited at all." Silbert's prose beautifully matches the story's scaled-down tone. just as there were no heroes (or heroines) in the '30s, everyone being too busy staying alive, so too there are no heroes (or heroines) in the '90s, everyone being too busy staying alive. Meet the old boss, same as the new boss.

Silbert's prose is delicately tuned, her dialogue is expertly elliptical, exactly as real speech is. There is humor, as there is wit, in her fictional world, but there are no yucks: she is writing, not performing. There is sadness in her fictional world, but not a single whine: she wants us to know her characters, not feel sorry for them. And know them we do, whether their two worlds are America and Europe, America and the Orient, or simply Man and Woman. The stories range literally all across the globe, always with the sure touch of someone who knows what she knows and wants us to know, never flailing, never straining and, above all, never faking. There is a deep pleasure in reading fiction that, even as it arcs dazzlingly back and forth between worlds, never tries to be anything but just is. Layle Silbert's stories not only shape experience, they are experience. She should be far better known than she is.