In the New York Style
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS & WRITING In the New York Style By Raymond Rosenthal New York, as Paul Goodman has said, is an empire city, with all the pomp and misery, the glory and distress that the title implies. It...
...His satire is brisk, glancing, keyed to the rhythms of everyday speech with all its plateaus of flat repartee and its hilarious heights of newly-coined platitudes...
...Liben knows the terrors of business life too, and stories like "Solomon's Gift" remind me of Italo Svevo's ironic, detached, lovingly detailed accounts of the traumas of buying and selling...
...He was eavesdropping...
...She is a striking addition to the company of New York writers with something to say and the means to say it...
...She is meeting people all the time and is completely alone...
...To divert his attention from her secret noises, he asked her if she liked music...
...Here, for example, is George watching his blowsy hostess gorge herself at a dinner party: "He sat back and observed Minnie as the bone, held by two fat little fingers, slid in and out of her mouth...
...Follow Victor and you're never behind the times...
...There is still no New York peer of Faulkner or Willa Cather, but a large number of possible claimants are pressing forward...
...But her "weary purse" protests, her "bewildered checkbook" complains...
...She has a shining ability to get down the facts, minutely, sympathetically, devastat-ingly...
...almost all the others were disoriented by its apparent simplicity or disgruntled by its unexpectedness, its recalcitrance to the terms of current categories...
...The outsiders, like F. Scott Fitzgerald or John Updike, may fall for the city's glamour and even do a good job of evoking it in their prose...
...Her other hand pressed lovingly against her breasts as she leaned forward over her plate...
...chemban, to purge our deteriorated food????and she wants to take courses in Love and the Global Crisis...
...The difference lies in the brilliantly unsparing yet sympathetic portrait of the protagonist of Maybe, the chirpy, restless, time-eating widow, Myra, whose inner life is really a delightful voyage through the city's despairing amusements...
...My column this week will deal with three of them, all of unusual interest and all a living rebuke to some incautious words of my own...
...Liben is unquestionably a natural, a New York natural, who winds out his softly cadenced sentences with a firm notion of what he is about and where he is heading...
...She dropped the bone and rubbed one hand against the other as though snuffing it out...
...George teaches in the city and commutes to the suburban darkness every evening...
...Blechman weighs New York's pleasures, through Myra's questing eyes, and discovers them all wanting in some important human way...
...Blechman has a fine ear for dialogue and every sentence is a charming fragment from the holocaust of New York chatter...
...Burt blechman rocketed into prominence with his first novel, How Much...
...Indeed, his lyricism combines a longing for the romance of impossible ideals with the grit of a carefully observed actuality...
...She knows that fate is character and makes no bones about the moral judgments which divide her characters into those who are damned by softness or hysteria or sheer incompetence at life's tasks, and those who will manage somehow to overhaul or revive a character that has been damaged...
...Or else sanity will become just another cog in a flat tire.' " The marvel of Blechman's novel is that the pace of Myra's frantic search never lets up for a moment...
...The rites of a children's game are wittily discussed in "You're It...
...She sounded like a boat in a squall...
...Myra lunches in Russian tearooms and Mexican tamale joints, goes to the opera, struggles against her wish to watch television, take tranquilizers, argue with the maid...
...Since when is peace a dirty word?' demands Syd Tannenbaum...
...Her despair is deeper than George's because she has inwardly given up...
...His latest novel, Maybe (Prentice-Hall, 207 pp., $4.95) is a return to the satire of How Much?, but with a difference...
...In an ideal anthology of the best American short stories, Liben's "You're It," "The Locking Gas Cap," "The Business of Poetry," and "Solomon's Wisdom" would, in my view, find a secure place...
...Her pathos is as real as the phrases she uses to describe it are thin and brittle...
...In any sane creative situation the appearance of Meyer Liben's novella and short stories, Justice Hunger (Dial, 259 pp., $4.50), would have resulted in hosannas...
...A city, I think some Frenchman said, is a machine for the masses' pleasure, or at least it should be...
...Supple, flowing, modest in its language but vaulting in its ambitions, Meyer Liben's fiction is also unique because it expresses something that one has forgotten should be the imagination's best gift: I refer to the wisdom that stands behind all these stories, wisdom which always has a touch of satiric resignation, yet is not merely resigned or cynical...
...Since when are we, the humble members of sanity, too proud to beg for peace, too sophisticated to demand a truce...
...The War of Camp Omongo, Stations and The Octopus Papers, which are all distinguished by the same elan and expert workmanship...
...He is the only writer I know who can make a simple walk through the city's streets a matter for ecstatic contemplation...
...But when the characters and story take command, as in the last section of this novel, her writing has verve, pace and the unstudied brilliance of genuine imagination...
...In the title story, Justice Hunger, we experience a romantic evocation of the tag-end of the radical 30s, when New York was still an enchanting city????that is, you could still saunter in it????and young people fell in love through the mists of ideology and politics...
...A few critics, notably Theodore Solo-taroff and Irving Howe, responded to the work as it deserves, pointing out the uniqueness of the personality revealed by this book...
...but beyond the wit lie the terrors of child's play, evoked in an artfully offhand fashion...
...Ask . . .' " '. . . Peace in our time is out of style,' insists sanity's public relationist...
...Myra belongs to any number of worthy organizations????sanity, to wipe out the Bomb...
...but it takes an indurated native to strike that peculiar note of restrained hysteria, speedy wit, gloomy humor, tough lyricism and rough intensity that marks the city's real inner life...
...His wife, Emma, is sodden with an unnamed unhappiness...
...A thousand other organizations are demanding the same thing...
...In the interim he has written three novels...
...Her son, Paul, wants to make a killing with Maisonettes?Luxurious living for active, thrifty people...
...We need a new word, not so militant...
...Here is a discussion at sanity: " 'Peace,' shouts Vic Brown, 'is old hat...
...She is also witty in the New York style????direct, clipped, fanciful...
...Something unique, encompassing and catchy...
...It is remarkable for its crispness of phrase, its unbemused clarity of vision, and its solidly presented, beautifully realized cast of characters...
...I mentioned a few weeks ago the fiction drought we are living through...
...Yet, by some miracle of grace, it manages to avoid making Myra into a depthless cipher...
...Strictly for appeasers...
...Liben is a lyrical poet who is always banging his toe against hard fact...
...It is a tour de force of comic skill, never relenting, like the clocks that dog poor Myra, skipping ahead with the bounce of harsh New York humor...
...Somehow the ideals that the city rejects continue to live in a dogged, subterranean manner in the writer's comments and sly witticisms...
...It is also an extraordinarily fruitful region for the imaginative writer of an indelibly special bent...
...Let's stand out a bit.' "Myra agrees...
...there is a drought, but despite this there has been a scattering of good books????a continuing sign that the creative faculty has not succumbed to the clamp of fashion or the gab of runaway apocalypticism...
...He keeps on fighting, befriends a drop-out, tries to regain his own sense of reality by helping the listless kid to some sense of decency...
...From Daniel Fuchs to Goodman himself, the New York regionalists, a school not yet properly ticketed in the halls of academia, have been steadily adding to a body of imaginative work whose quality and charm rivals that of other regions...
...The dark shadow cast in the suburbs by the empire city is the subject of Paula Fox's remarkable first novel, Poor George (Harcourt, Brace and World, 220 pp., $4.50...
...which discerning critics all the way from W. H. Auden to Saul Bellow ????a vast area of culture, if you think of it????praised for its satiric sharpness and its dazzling use of idiom...
...He heard her breath working its way through layers of clothing...
...Sometimes the wit gets in the way, imparting a too lacquered surface to her prose, an archness that is out of place...
...When she swallowed her ears crackled...
...Ask the men who died at Verdun if peace is old hat...
...Cab drivers and her suppressed Irish maid are her only confidants...
...It is hopeless, and disaster, marvelously depicted in the last 40 pages of the book, inches forward inevitably Miss Fox has a toughness that is unusual among the lamenters and dissectors of suburban gloom...
...I can think of no higher praise...
...After all," his wife says, "homosexuals have to live somewhere, too...
...Liben has invented a prose style that employs all the richness and variety of his personality, so that a philosophical reflection can lead to a joke, a joke can deviate into a discussion, a discussion can bring us back to the mystery of individual existence...
Vol. 50 • July 1967 • No. 14
