Do the Windows Open? Stories. - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1998 by Gary R. Grund

by Julie Hecht. New York: Random House, 1997. 212 pages. $21 cloth.

When delivering a talk to the Georgia Writers' Association in the early 1960s, Flannery O'Connor discussed the ways in which regional literature transcends provincialism and argued that the best American fiction is always regional. "It has passed to and stayed longest," she said, "wherever there has been a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of reading a small history in a universal light." Although the Georgia landscape is about as far as can be from the Long Island Expressway, Julie Hecht's collection, Do the Windows Open?, presents as regional a perspective as O'Connor's and one just as tragicomic:

   As I looked around I saw that I was trapped, waiting on East Fortieth
   Street in a cavernous nowhere surrounded by midtown. I was gripped by a
   fear of the thought of what it would be like to stroll aimlessly through
   this part of Manhattan. When in midtown, always have a purpose and walk
   rapidly between appointments, to work, and on errands. In this way you
   can't be overwhelmed, overtaken, by the mammoth emptiness of square gray
   spaces and empty buildings.

      Your tiny remnant of a soul is crushed into a fragment of itself by
   traveling the streets of New York--but it can't be obliterated if you keep
   walking. Walk briskly, ride, leave town if it's over forty degrees, wear
   dark glasses if the sun is out, stay near Central Park on the Upper East
   Side, never go to a business district on weekends, never even be in New
   York on a weekend.

The nine stories, all of which appeared, naturally enough, in The New Yorker, present us with an anguished, middle-aged, macrobiotic, dentally-challenged narrator, Isabelle, who seeks signs of life among Manhattan's grotesqueries, punctuating the observation of their inanities--and hers--with wit and intelligence. The title story is especially instructive both for its content as well as its form.

The windows are those of the South Fork bus the narrator rides from East Hampton to New York instead of driving herself--"How could I have thought I could drive among trucks?" After sending her husband on a test run, she boards her ship of fools, white-knuckled and searching for the seatbelts. The other passengers look like O'Connor's patients in "Revelation," except on wheels, a combination of the "sado-masochistic-black-leather Hampton set," "a commandant from the bus company ... [who] had a look that identified his origins as Montauk and Poland," and a "light-skinned, sixty-year-old African-Spanish-American woman ... [who] recited outdated civil rights slogans," among a bevy of others. The humor is dour, black, and flawless.

Every story is a similar journey, if not literally, then certainly introspectively, where metaphors of vision--Isabelle is a photographer whose subjects include "flowers in decline" and famous physicians and their dogs-multiply as Hecht's narrator, like Doctor T. J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, watches over the ruins of sanity, order, and sense from her own battered, solitary perspective:

   My loss of enthusiasm for everything could have been due to other factors.
   I'd recently heard David Letterman ask B. B. King to sing "The Thrill is
   Gone." Dave said that he personally understood what it meant. Perhaps the
   feeling had nothing to do with a public-school background but with that
   other thing--the over-forty sense of various problems and disappointments
   people feel before getting into the next phase of life, where they're
   simply glad to be alive, having accepted the loss of youth and the hope
   that any of their dreams for the world might come true.

While Hecht's alienated, self-obsessed narrator and her vague sense of emptiness and disillusionment might suggest a minimalist approach to fiction--consider, too, the endless references to brand names, sitcoms, Gotham trivia--Hecht is no minimalist. On the contrary, her collection is more akin, I think, to traditional short fiction, particularly to other synchronic series--each story at once both independent and interdependent with all the other stories in the collection--despite the fact that there is little character development and even less plot. This format was especially popular at the turn of the century in periodicals, but adapted by writers as diverse as Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Conan Doyle. Hecht's "world-renowned reproductive surgeon Dr. Arnold Loquesto" is as ubiquitous as Doyle's Professor Moriarty, and traces of earlier episodes are highly recurrent, almost palimpsestic, in later ones. To the same extent, Manhattan (or Nantucket where the narrator summers), like Joyce's Dublin, never changes its geography or its effect.

The universe, however, is not a causal one for Hecht, and there are no epiphanies despite the intensely self-reflexive gaze of her narrator. Nothing is ever clear:

   As I lay in bed with the pounding on the side of my head, I looked out at
   the garden of our rented house, a garden still in full bloom, even though
   it was August--the month that was often given as a reason gardens were out
   of bloom--and with self-loathing I remembered the character Oblomov. I
   compared my lying in bed and looking at the garden, the quince tree, the
   bumblebees, white butterflies, and chirping birds while trying to decide
   between a caffeine fix and a pharmaceutical one--with the lying in bed of
   Oblomov. I felt myself to be a wastrel and my life to have been wasted.