Way back in 2005, I wrote a few short reviews for a now defunct publication called Playback St. Louis. I had thought these reviews were forever lost, but have now successfully retrieved them. Because I feel I owe it to posterity (someone's posterity, anyway), I am here posting two of them, a review of Steve Stern's The Angel of Forgetfulness and a combined review of Ronald Sukenick's Last Fall and Rikki Ducornet's The Word "Desire."
Fuel For Stories
In his first novel since Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Underground (1991), Steve
Stern has produced what is probably his most ambitious work to date. The Angel of
Forgetfulness ranges over two different epochs in American history, several centuries of
Jewish history, and relates three interconnected stories. It attempts a kind of literary
archaeology of Jewish life on the Lower East Side of New York in the early twentieth
century, while also depicting one character’s ultimate rediscovery of the lasting vitality of
Jewish culture. And it seeks to provoke reflection on the way in which storytelling and
imagination can often disarm our merely rational powers. Happily, the novel carries out
every one of these tasks with great skill, making it both an impressive display of literary
artistry and a virtuoso act of storytelling in its own right.
In the years between Harry Kaplan and The Angel of Forgetfulness, Stern
published one collection of novellas, A Plague of Dreamers (1994), and one short story
collection, The Wedding Jester (1994), which, along with the previous story collection
Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (1987), contain some of the finest short fiction by an
American writer to appear in the past twenty years. Stern’s stories are part fable, part
comedy routine (the two come together most explicitly in the title story of The Wedding
Jester), reminiscent to some degree of the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard
Malamud, and Stanley Elkin. His earliest fiction depicted a Jewish enclave in Memphis,
Tennessee called The Pinch, but more recently he has broadened his focus to include
characters and settings beyond the somewhat peculiar (although vividly rendered)
circumstances of an American Jewish community attempting to maintain itself in the
post-Civil War South.
Saul Bozoff, the protagonist of The Angel of Forgetfulness, is a native of
Memphis, but the novel follows him on his journey out of the city of his birth and toward.
. .he doesn’t really know what. The first chapter (a tour de force in and of itself) finds
Saul attending college in New York City, where he meets Aunt Keni, one of the few
surviving residents of what was a thriving Jewish neighborhood. Saul is drawn to Keni
and her stories about the old neighborhood, and she passes on to him a manuscript—The
Angel of Forgetfulness—written by Nathan Hart, Keni’s long-dead lover. The rest of the
novel alternates between Saul’s subsequent experiences on a hippie commune and as an
instructor in a small New England college, a reconstruction of Nathan Hart’s life story as
a recent immigrant and then a writer for the Jewish Daily Forward, and excerpts from the
manuscript itself, which tells the fantastic tale of an angel named Mocky, who prefers life
on earth to a less eventful existence in heaven.
The connections between the three stories remain tantalizingly open for most of
the novel, but they eventually come together in a wholly satisfying way that reveals them
to be much more than simply parallel narratives. And the ingenuity with which Stern
molds his stories one from and into the other is matched by the color and the vigor of his
prose style, which has always been, in tandem with his powers of invention, the great
delight of his fiction. Steve Stern is, finally, a writer able to unite imagination and skill
with language in an almost unbeatable combination.
After he begins composing his Angel of Forgetfulness, we are told of Nathan Hart
that “Experience was the raw material of fiction, and Nathan had had so little of it,
nothing that he believed would translate readily into stories. He had for his fuel only
secondhand stories, though he couldn’t recall ever having read the one he found himself
writing now.” Readers are likely to conclude they’ve never read anything quite like the
stories Steve Stern has to tell, either.
Off The Beaten Path
The American novelist Ronald Sukenick died of a degenerative muscle disease in
2004. His legacy includes not only his numerous works of fiction and criticism but also a
collection of publications and presses that attempt to maintain a place for innovative
writing in contemporary literary culture. Directly, Sukenick founded the Fiction
Collective (now FC2) as a publishing venue for experimental fiction, as well as American
Book Review, which focuses its attention largely on new works of experimental fiction
and poetry and in general works to remind us that the sort of book discussion to be found
in the New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books does not begin to
get at the variety of serious writing to be discovered at smaller presses more dedicated to
literature than to commerce. Indirectly, Sukenick forged an alliance of sorts with the
Center for Book Culture, which publishes the journals Context and the Review of
Contemporary Fiction and helped to subsidize Dalkey Archive Press, which both
publishes new fiction—especially fiction in translation—and preserves an invaluable
backlist of important if unjustly neglected innovative fiction published during the last
century or so.
Together, FC2 and Dalkey Archive probably represent the most concerted and
successful effort in American publishing to present an alternative to mainstream “literary
fiction” that is at least as “literary” without being stylized and “serious” in a
conventionally earnest way. Unorthodox storytelling (as well as imaginative
reconsiderations of storytelling itself) and challenges to the dominance or realism are the
norm at these presses, and both qualities can be found in two of their recent releases, The
Word “Desire” by Rikki Ducornet (actually a reprint by Dalkey Archive of a 1997 book
first published by Henry Holt) and Sukenick’s own final novel, Last Fall (FC2). Both
books will provide readers with something other than familiar reading experiences, and
both will introduce new readers to authors whose other works are well worth seeking out.
(Five of Ducornet’s other books are available at Dalkey Archive, while many of
Sukenick’s previous books—including such seminal experimental fictions as 98.6 and
The Death of the Novel and Other Stories—are also to be found on FC2’s backlist.)
Ducornet writes erotically charged fables and fairy tales to some degree
reminiscent of the fiction of the British writer Angela Carter. As its title suggests, The
Word “Desire” is indeed focused on love and sex, especially on moments of sexual
awakening, of recognition of the irresistible power of desire. In “The Chess Set of Ivory,”
the book’s first story, a young girl is confronted with the fact of her mother’s infidelity
and its effect on her father, a professor teaching in Egypt. In “Roseveine,” a man tells the
story of his childhood infatuation with a mature woman (his mother’s friend) that has, to
say the least, contributed to his apparent insanity. While telling the tale of her own sexual
awakening, the narrator of “The Many Tenses of Wanting” sets forth what might be the
primary theme of the book: “I believe it is so that one’s sexuality is fixed at an early age.
One is impressionable and a visual experience has the impress of a firebrand. I mean one
see something so puissant it sets the mind on fire, an inextinguishable fire that—if it
cools to embers with the passage of hours and days—can be rekindled by a random
word.”
In one of the best stories in The Word “Desire”, “The Foxed Mirror,” a priest
otherwise repulsed by sex (“the thought of a woman’s thighs is terrible”) becomes
sexually obsessed with a male artist. Perhaps the most outrageous stories (which is saying
something) are “Fortune,” narrated by the pet dog of Napoleon’s Josephine, and
“Opium’” about a dying Pope who is suckled by a wet nurse. While plot descriptions
such as these do begin to suggest the extraordinary qualities of Ducornet’s fiction, the
reader will also find her stories replete with vividly rendered scenes, etched by
Ducornet’s incisive prose style, and satisfyingly bizarre plot turns.
Sukenick’s Last Fall shares something of Ducornet’s surrealistic approach,
although in this case the novel’s skewed perspective on specifically contemporary reality
(the novel is set in New York just before and just after the events of 9/11/01, and contains
a very compelling account of the immediate aftermath of the Trade Tower collapses)
might more accurately characterized as what the novelist John Barth called “irrealism.”
The characters and events depicted in Last Fall are located just on the other side of the
line separating the plausible from the implausible (although one might say that 9/11
represents the moment when the unreality of American life can no longer be
exaggerated), but not so far as to make them unrecognizable as a version of the world we
readers must otherwise inhabit. It tells the story of the “Museum of Temporary Art” and
those associated with it, its plot (which is mostly displaced by the ongoing historical
events) centering on an ostensible theft from the museum’s collection. This theft remains
the novel’s unresolved mystery, since a museum of “temporary” art has no collection:
It was a matter of theft, but the problem was that nobody knew what had
been stolen. The museum was banking on my expertise as a professor of postcontemporary art both to identify the stolen work and, if possible, to get it back.
None of this had been made public and, in fact, even the personnel of the
museum were unaware, except for a vague feeling of unease, which was itself part
of the evidence. Because the feeling that something, something important, was
gone was a factor. That is, how else, other that through feeling, were they to know
that something was gone when they didn’t know what it was?
Last Fall is a rather more straightforwardly rendered narrative than most of
Sukenick’s fiction (although it does move from character to character in a way that
requires the reader’s careful attention). It does not much feature the kind of play with
typography and sentence boundaries typical of Sukenick’s other work, and while readers
new to Sukenick might find this beneficial and Last Fall a more accessible introduction
to his brand of experimental fiction, others might prefer his less explicitly allegorical,
more formally challenging work. Nonetheless, the posthumous publication of Ronald
Sukenick’s final novel is a valuable reminder that Sukenick was a figure central to the
flourishing of American postmodern fiction, an important writer whose achievement is
now complete and available for discovery and rediscovery by readers looking for an
alternative to the “mainstream” in American fiction.