Versions of Initiation

...From the moment his parents take him to see Gone with the Wind, he is a slave to the magic of the screen, living by its myths and heroes, and gomg to work as a delivery boy in Golden's pharmacy for movie money...

...Agam the setting of the story is an offbeat fringe job, good work for people who like quick intimacies, mobilizing then: energies in short spurts and living m a carry-out culture As usual, Kessler introduces his Jewish characters without the sense of a conscious Jewish theme, though he has a particularly keen ear for certain f arruhar rhythms of lower middle-class Jewish complamt The milieu is absorbed m these stories very much as in real life, rather absent-mmdedly "Second Honeymoon" is the most objective of Kessler's stones, good enough to make a reader wish him its qualities of forbearance and frugality for the new fiction he will be writing It is clear that the touch of cholera elsewhere m this book could be productively transformed from a private and aesthetic into a social emotion And yet of course, when that land of objectification takes place, a writer can more easily protect himself Only in his instinctive tastes, his irrational likes and hatreds, and his exaggerations is he open and vulnerable and therefore easier to respond to So perhaps this writer should be left to his faulty excellence and go on trying to catch "tigers m red weather...

...Joseph works hard to earn his daydreams There is a Calvinist (or is it Israelite7) streak of thoroughness m him, and soon he is as masterful at his duties m the kingdom of pills and beauty remedies as Joseph m Egypt One day he is sent to deliver a package to a woman customer whose apartment, though probably only a cut or two above what he is used to, looks to him, with its cut crystals and plum velvet drapes, like a palace The woman is in a white kimono decorated with dragons, and her hair is jet black like that of the fabulous Eurasian in "Terry and the Pirates " In subsequent incarnations, she comes jitterbugging out to him as Jean Arthur, with brown curly hair, white socks and saddle oxfords or, sheathed in sequined gold as Gloria Grahame In her apartment, entermg a new kind of bondage, Joseph nevertheless takes a step toward reality Only her masks are imaginary, her demands are real The other delivery boy refuses to venture so far, and hovers in the drugstore basement, isolated with his masturbatory postcard and movie magazme fantasies Joseph has been mainly drawn to the woman as the personification of his day-dreaming, movie-bound life Like him she is glamour-haunted, and hves on borrowed self-images But m the end, reality is more seductive, and nudged by it, Joseph breaks away from her and from the adolescent pattern of his life as well...

...Versions of Initiation By Isa Kapp WRITERS) ourselves long since initiated and disabused of the mysteries of sex and even of politics This may be the only recently pubhshed story not ashamed to echo the brimming cadences of a Dylan Thomas poem and to inherit his sweet warm clutch of the physical world The same sort of innocence and candor buoy up a slight and perhaps somewhat overliterary story, "Jack the Giant Killer," that describes a young married couple touring the harbor town of Penzance m England They have one of those disarming relationships m which the wife is able to adore her husband's mystifying temperament and indeed his very dissimilarity from herself She is commonsensical, he restless and Lawrencian, bent on getting to the extremities of things, and wresting something extraordinary from his journey, as magical as Jack's beans in the children's tale In our last glimpse of him, he gleefully produces a carved ivory dagger niched from a local castle It is high time to get to Kessler's best and longest story, "An Egyptian Bondage " The plot is ingenious, the mood enveloping and the momentum so strong that we are willingly swept mto exaggerations and glitter that we might back away from in some of the other stones The hero is an adolescent boy, Joseph, who develops a consuming passion for movies...

...There is a wonderful overlapping of many lands of bondage in the story, which is also, of course, another version of initiation—this tune dark, overscented and insistent It could be conveying a boy's resistance not only to the dominion of movies and fantasy, but to the devouring Female of experience He is getting a first view of the unremitting need and yearning that womanhood can impose on man All this passion is leavened by amusing parallels with the Bible story The woman's house, called The Alexandna, has Moonsh archways, and both Josephs have left a coat with a predatory lady As m several other stories, the Zeitgeist is pleasantly anachronistic It was certainly in another time that adolescents had the emotional room to create their private worlds out of a pubhc medium Now, assaulted by the regulanty of rv, and by psychologizing hit records that give instant form to their most secret anxieties, there is hardly an introvert left It may be that many adolescents have gone as far as marijuana and lsd to discover the sensation of bemg alone There is one other equally sure-handed story in this collection, "Second Honeymoon," which is different in manner from all the others It is told through the strident, jaundiced urban voice of a 38-year-old woman fund-raiser, accustomed to having men make sexual advances to her because she is divorced She descnbes her fund-raising stint m Buffalo, where a co-worker pursues her even as his wife joins them m the hope of a second honeymoon at Niagara Falls The man's pleas grow increasingly clumsier and more pathetic while the nanator speaks more contemptuously, yet somehow the story succeeds in making us feel this tough woman's grudging sympathy and even professional admiration for the man she calls a "shlep...