SCHOOM. - Review - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Rob Jacklosky

SCHOOM by Jonathan Wilson. New York: Penguin, 1995. 217 pages. $10.95 paper.

Thomas Beller's characters are charming in their breezy insouciance, in their daily battles to love and be loved in a hermetically sealed Upper West Side. More than once, in the course of these ten short stories, we are told that the characters live "artificial bubble" existences--it's a bubble that readers will have a hard time penetrating.

Characters are self-obsessed in a Seinfeldian way, only they are self-obsessed without being funny. And "Seinfeld minus laughs" is not a winning formula. These stories prove, if Seinfeld and Whit Stillman had not already, that comedy is crucial to making this level of yuppie self-absorption enjoyable. Charm and good humor won't do, nor will lucid stories and surgically clean sentences.

In fairness, the stories seem built to exploit the self-absorption of the characters, but just as often, protagonists--almost all of them veiled Beller alter-egos--are described in a way that suggests the author is as infatuated with his heroes as the heroes are with themselves. In the story "Seduction Theory" when a young woman describes the protagonist as "looking ... a little pleased with himself ... [with a] smug and handsome face ..." she is describing the entire attitude of this collection: smug and a little pleased with itself.

In stories like "The Dark Piano," "Deep Purple" and "World Without Mothers," we are meant to sympathize with the well-to-do boys rattling around cavernous Manhattan apartments in a world without parents (but not without trust funds), boys being sent to and from boarding school, and using the streets of the West `70s as their playground of privilege. But unless one is a similarly privileged latch-key kid, it is difficult to work up much sympathy for them.

Though there is something diverting about the particularity of Beller's New York, the overall effect is oddly airless. It is New York as stage set. Some plots are as plastic as the scenery, like that of "Hot Dog War," which begins outside Gray's Papaya on 72nd and Broadway. In it, the bland narrator Walter is surprised when his quirky friend Auggie steals away Delia, the quirky object of his infatuation. Walter is the only one who is surprised.

Beller is most charming when he allows his hero to be weak or cowardly, as in "Seduction Theory," where the smugly handsome narrator is bullied and intimidated by a more masculine rival. When Beller allows his protagonists to be flawed and insensitive, he reveals himself to be astute about how relationships work. In "Non-destructive Testing" a would-be smoothie parlays a promising office romance into an awkward mauling of an attractive office co-worker. In stories such as these, with their inconclusive gestures, unstated intentions, and spiky, ambivalent conversations, 1990s romance is laid bare. In them, characters waver between arrogance and inadequacy, blurt and then regret, or are surprised by what they've said. Mostly, they end up alone. The stories are, as one character puts it, about people in "rigid contexts"--whether they be their work place or their adolescence. Some stories are even explicitly constructed as experiments, which perhaps explains the overall antiseptic feel of this collection.

After reading Beller's stories, which feel as shiny, air-conditioned and featureless as a new car showroom, it is a positive relief to find yourself in the deserts and bazaars of Jonathan Wilson's Schoom. Many of the stories in this twelve-story collection are set in places like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. This is not a desert of open vistas, but of close quarters in old cities. Densely packed with textures (emotional, verbal and visual) these stories are refreshingly scenic, and intensely detailed, as in the following passage from "Savyon," a story about how a kidnapping makes the Tel Aviv rich feel suddenly vulnerable:

   All around me were the noises that accompany the rich at leisure: the
   scrape and mow of gardening crews, the hypnotic ticking of multiple
   sprinklers, the secure dull thunk of ball on racquet. Beyond a nearby wall
   the neighbour's children dived and splashed in their own private pool. Were
   they scared? They didn't sound it. Nevertheless, I thought to myself: it's
   been exposed, the hush-hush life of the Savyon rich.

Descriptions like this, which see the broader implications of local detail, mark almost every story, even if the stories themselves suffer from a kind of sameness. More than half of this expatriate British author's stories have to do with the feelings of exile of modern-day Jews in the US, London, Cypress, or Israel. The stories are shot through with insight, and an impressive cultural referentiality, as references to Rauschenberg and Keats and Homeric "wine-dark seas" season the worldliness of the collection. From a young Anglo-Jewish boy's acquaintance with an AWOL American flier in a Blitz-era London, to an American couple inspired by Gulf War scud attacks on Tel Aviv to emigrate to Israel, Wilson's collection is as international as Beller's is parochial. The stories are also told from a satisfying cross-section of narrators: young American and Israeli women, chauvinist American professors, young British boys, and most often, open-minded middle-aged artists.