New York, New York. - Review - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Sanford Pinsker

NEW YORK, NEW YORK by Layle Silbert. Laurinburg, North Carolina: St. Andrews College Press, 1996.95 pages. $10 paper.

As the old television show loved to insist, there are eight million stories in "The Naked City"--the naked city being New York. Layle Silbert's latest collection gives us fifteen of them, each delivered with economy, painstaking craft, and an eye for the odd. In "32527," for example, a woman tries to convince a tattoo artist to put the number 32537 on her forearm ("she'd changed from 32526 to 32527 because she wanted a slash through the seven in the European style to make the number authentic") and when he refuses --"I can't do it. It's against my professional principles"--she does the job herself, etching in the numbers with a "blue marker labeled `not water soluble, needle point.'"

Why? Because she has broken up with her latest lover? Because her life is. boring, empty and essentially meaningless? Because the numbers on her forearm will provide a connection with history that she lacks? Such a story might begin in surprise (as Silbert's surely does), but to be effective it must end by convincing us of its inevitability. Alas, "32527" does not, partly because we cannot shake the suspicion that it too easily exploits the Holocaust and partly because Silbert's protagonist never becomes as interesting, or as complicated, as the numbers inked into her arm.

Granted, the story ends on a resonating poetic note (Silbert's first book was a collection of poems), as Zoe, her protagonist, realizes that "she'd turned herself into a victim" and that she could not convince others that the numbers are fakes. So, "with a wetter finger, she rubbed the numbers. They didn't change. It was going to take time for them to wear off."

Other stories have equally bizarre premises. In "The Table," Salvatore Bimbi is struck dead by a table that falls from a seventh floor hotel window. Only in New York, as a wag might put it; but the oddness is precisely what draws a crowd and makes for a story. For in insular New York, people can walk past each other--indeed, live in apartments next to each other for decades--without acknowledging this human fact. Survival, among other things, dictates such behavior. Silbert's stories are designed to force her characters into involvement, and then into minor epiphanies.

In general, the stories work, although not without our seeing the wires that make them move and noticing the city maps that inch them toward their respective destinies. That many of these stories appeared in magazines such as South Dakota Review, Colorado State Review, and Broomstick suggests that they are well down on the short story food chain. However, this is a case where accumulation and juxtaposition help, not only by mutual reinforcement, but also by conveying a sense of the city larger than any single installment. Joyce's Dubliners it most certainly isn't, although what New York, New York is, in fact, is entirely credible.

SANFORD PINSKER

Franklin and Marshall College