Escaping Relations

...Richard is a blocked painter who tries unsuccessfully to entangle Helene in his darkening private vision...

...she brings home from Israel, we are treated to the details of a decaying smorgasbord: "As the evening wore on, greasy plates loaded with chicken bones, olive pits, pickle stems, white fish skeletons, bread crusts, and balled napkins began to mount...

...Helene and I. Moving toward each other, away from each other...

...Sudah, a dashing and broken-tongued con-artist?You look to my eyes beautiful and strange," is how he greets his wife-to-be at the airport after an enforced separation shortly before their marriage—assists Mara in subverting her inherited values...

...Grinning widely, he pushed the towel to the floor and drew her damp body to his pillowed breast...

...Or is the fate of the Lieb clan—its desperate effort to hold on to a past of accumulated, centuries-old significance at the same time as it tries to grab a chunk of the glittering and seductive American present—urgent in the very fact of its horrid singularity...

...What Martin manages to convey, in language all the more resonant for being so determinedly low-keyed, is that this obsession with flight, or at least the maintained possibility of flight, creates a paralysis of its own, a subtle inertia of emotions rather than of limbs...

...For Christ's sake,' I said...

...When Mara, Leon and Rose Lieb's youngest daughter, marries Sudah, the shady stranger ("Perhaps he was French...

...Her hair had been cut so short it stood up from her scalp...

...Mara's dazed, overweight mother, Rose, is forced to attend the hearing in court together with her husband and their devoted but ineffectual son, Herzl...

...She refuses to grant herself any energizing sense of mission and conducts her personal life with a similar calculated affectlessness...

...His psychiatrist gives Maggie two notebooks that are found in his pockets...

...Can she harm me...

...too lavish with its peripheral effects and crucially lacking in either believable motivation or a sense of clear intention: Are Mara and the beset family she tries to put behind her nothing more than preposterous, doomed members in a larger, doomed Jewish Family...

...For example, an interesting, if small fact about Jewish fiction is that, ever since the groaning Bar Mitzvah repast in Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar, it invariably features a lot of food...

...Helene goes to the university to check Clarissa's office and stumbles instead upon Michael: "The light seemed to be coming from him...

...The last we hear of, Mara is living in an island cave, that is furnished with the / Ching, and has received Sudah's charmingly elliptical letter from France: "I am so tired I go to sleep under a tree...

...About her longDai'HNE Mkrkin, our guest columnist, has contributed to Commentary, The New Republic, and other publications...

...Helene is driving from New Orleans to visit her friend Clarissa in Baton Rouge...

...These vignettes contain some of the best writing in the book, making one wonder how their author could fall for a creep like Sudah and, more importantly, why Tova Reich chose to limit her keenest observation to her wonderful digressions...

...Perhaps the problem with Reich's often very funny and occasionally very sad book is the problem of Jewish fiction as a genre—namely, that it has not been able to find a durable mode of evocation other than the relentlessly ironic, black-comedic one of Roth, Bellow, & Co...

...The book opens, signally, with a random encounter...

...This is love, who's afraid of whom...

...Her front teeth were chipped...

...In the morning I open my eyes...

...One can only speculate what Mara might have been had Tova Reich struggled beyond the seemingly personal vendetta that has led her to create a family admitting of no possibilities other than the grotesque...

...The devil—if devils were allowed into such firmly disbelieving novels—in disguise, as Helene is to discover after she goes to bed with him...

...Certainly he was not the boy you wished for your daughter...

...The allure of disengagement is a recurrent and popular American motif: Innumerable films, from Five Easy Pieces to the more recent Looking for Mr...

...But it camouflages, too, the radical pain of an historical adjustment that is the more difficult because the pain is mocked, and the adjustment to secular imperatives is taken for granted...

...On his head he wore the African skullcap, and his dark nipples were visible through the thin white cotton of his shirt...

...If the latter theme had predominated, it would have suggested a much needed movement of Jewish fiction away from its slightly childlike intrigue with ethnic artifact per se —Jewish mothers, chicken soup, etc.—on to a level of discourse where the conflicts have matured into sources of larger insight...

...It is perhaps a healthy instinct, this racial passion for exposure, indeed a self-preserving one...

...Unfortunately, the author abandons the potentially innovative in favor of the classic Jewish literary tradition of ridiculing its own complex origins...

...He whispered in Mara's ear, 'Now you are so pure...

...But whereas Binx, the narrator of The Moviegoer, is beset by his sense of failed purpose and tries to expiate it in the afterglow of the silver screen—to win for himself "as plenary an existence" as he imagines William Hol-den's to be—Helene has resigned herself to futility and has lost sight of even this dim, vicarious irradiation...

...Perhaps he was an artist...

...So I have some...

...His eyes were startlingly blue, light, wide, looking as if they could not believe what they saw...

...His hair was light, long, surrounding his face in a full beard, so that he looked out from a circle of gold...

...Clarissa's house is mysteriously empty when Helene arrives...

...The reader is presented with all the trappings of a mystery novel, except that Martin, in the dry modern manner, adroitly bypasses the awesomeness of mystery for the prosaic ways of mere chance...

...The only serious alternative to the tongue-in-cheek route is the intensely cerebral, mythologizing imagination of Cynthia Ozick, for which one may, in fact, have to be Cynthia Ozick...

...standing affair with Reed, a drug addict, she remarks: "Certainly he could be treacherous...

...Inside fear is love...

...Tova Reich's Mara (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 250 pp., $8.95) is an altogether different sort of first novel—antic in plot, exploding with characters whose average metabolic rate is alarmingly high...

...There is Malamud, of course, but one could question the Jewishness of so reverent a sensibility as his...

...This brings to mind Isaac Rosenfeld's essay on the laws of kashrut, "Adam and Eve on Delancey Street," where he purports to interpret the Jewish fixation with "pure" and "impure" foods as a kind of sublimated sexual drive: "Eat, eat, eat...

...The young couple turns up in Rabbi Ashkenazi's study looking like exotic refugees from an anthropological exhibit: "Sudah's long hair was tied back with string...

...Mara was dressed in her workman's boots, above that three skirts of different lengths and a short threadbare velvet jacket fastened together with a rhinestone clip...

...Now we were going to have an emotional explosion...

...Love of the thing we fear...

...she assists the disenfranchised who are assigned to her with a grim, detached efficiency...

...The woman mysteriously disappears while Helene stops at a gas station...

...Valerie Martin has written a haunting, deceptively modest novel that explores the pervasive unease of our times with impressive skill...

...After locking himself in the bathroom and setting it on fire, he is hospitalized...

...Reich's novel is no exception to this rule...

...Will it harm...

...Not that we are never sated: food is not food and it cannot satisfy a hunger that is not hunger...

...Mara find various unconventional jobs to support herself in the roach-infested loft she has become accustomed to and, under pressure from her family, agrees to get a religious divorce from Sudah...

...Between the various external upheavals, we are given a peek at Mara's inner turmoil in the form of a series of essays she has written on the topic of "How I Lost My Virginity...

...Let's fuck.' " Rashi, the elder daughter, married to a psychiatrist, struggles to preserve a link between her parents' way of life and the bohemian existence Sudah and Mara embrace...

...It was more than 1 could stand...

...They continue to romp through one madcap scheme after another, however, all underwritten by her indulgent and wealthy father...

...Can it harm me...

...Writers & Writing ESCAPING REATIONS BY DAPHNE MERKIN As the title of her powerful and unsettling first novel, Set in Motion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 210 pp., $8.95), suggests, Valerie Martin writes about our contemporary romance with mobility, the freedom to get up and go—generally away from rather than toward involvement...

...When only a few brown specks remained of the chopped liver that had been molded into the form of a hen with three chicks, the band struck up a lively tune...

...But I knew him, 1 felt I knew where he would fail me, and I him, and these were not intentional failures, not acts of any kind, only the absence of will...

...Along the way she picks up a black woman who appears to be traveling with no destination in mind...

...One of them contains a description—lucid in its very madness—of the malaise that stifles the vital responses of a fugitive such as Helene, leaving her unable to reach out even when she would like to comfort a grieving Maggie: "I wanted to take her hand in my own, but even this small gesture struck me as too great an intrusion...

...Please don't cry,' I demanded...

...I would have to stop the car...

...Back home, Helene is employed as a social worker...

...The woman's evident distress threatens to arouse Helene's instinctive, albeit muffled, compassion: "When I glanced at her, I saw a tear trembling on the edge of her cheekbone, glistening in the dark...

...Goodbar, revolve around some aspect of our incapacity for sustained emotional commitment, and it is the favored subject of that elusive cultural avatar, Bob Dylan...

...Toward the close of the book Sudah pledges himself to celibacy and goes off to join an ashram...

...And yet, strangely enough, there is a chill that whistles through the frenzy of Mara while Set in Motion, despite its cool, flattened tone exudes, finally, an almost reluctant warmth...

...Can she avoid harming me...

...After she has immersed herself in the mik-vah (ritual baths) the night before her wedding in accordance with the laws of family purity, Sudah shows up in her dressing-room disguised as an ancient cleaning woman: "Sudah approached, slipping off his babushka...

...Meanwhile, the Lieb family finds itself the target of Senate investigations into the financial wheeling-dealing that goes on behind the doors of the many nursing-homes Rabi Leon Lieb owns...

...Jewish writers, especially those who have experienced observant religious life close at hand, have so far failed to develop the sort of relaxed gaze, the affectionate but critical eye that Catholic writers such as Mary McCarthy and the much-praised newcomer Mary Gordon (Final Payments) turn upon their spiritual backgrounds...

...Yet a page or so later the covert desperation of her attitude emerges with an ominous clarity: "No wonder I'm frightened, I thought, I'm living in a world of suicides...

...We don't waste our time looking around, speculating...

...Near the end of the novel, Helene, the narrator, admits: "I would never, never give up the option to walk away...

...Set in Motion is reminiscent of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer both in the more obvious detail of a shared New Orleans locale, and less tangibly in a common concern with a state of irredeemable enervation—a condition in which people brush by each other even when they are trying very hard to meet...

...Richard's insane jottings flicker with the denied intensity that is at the core of all these muted lives: "But for those of us in fear it's important to stay in motion...

...I see it is a cherry tree...

...She gave a little shudder and turned her face away from me...

...1 would wind up looking after this poor creature for the rest of my life...

...For behind this fluent, maniacally-paced entertainment lies something less slight, less farcical—a novel that confronts its own anger instead of disarming it with humor...

...Mara, regrettably, fastens upon the easier, less resonant theme: It tells a vast Jewish joke, the tragic one that Jews have been telling on themselves since they first set pen to paper, and it keeps you in stitches just as long as you don't stop laughing...

...The only obstruction in Helene's straitened path is Richard, the disturbed husband of Maggie, Helene's coworker...

...Mara, in being refreshingly knowledgeable about its Orthodox-Jewish subject, shows signs of a new poignancy in its depiction of the vulnerabilities so inbred an environment is prone to...

...I look up...