PARTISAN REVIEW
135
Beyond the room, our sobs, and her breaking, retrogressive voice, I
heard church bells. I squeezed her hands, shook my head and
staggered from the couch to a window.
Glass
broke,
I
fainted and
-
minutes later
I
awoke on a porch just below the window.
For me the least successful stories, those that
seem
slight, depend
on a conscious experimentation in which the words and images cannot
support the large effects of sexual violence or nightmare fears. "Her
crinoline broke under us like cinders." "I smeared her against the floor,
got up and smeared her against a wall." His dehumanized people do not
pull off their scenes of horror:
She cried. I made fists and pummeled my head. She cried. I pum–
meled until my head slipped into my neck. She stopped crying. I
smashed my mouth with my knee. She smiled a little.
Their encounters are overly abstract and arty. Directness is all: like a
group marathon, some of the stories in
Going Places
seem to substitute
hysteria for insight, to cry for results that will be depthless as the false
bottom of a conjurer's box.
It is notable, though, that with all the sense of innovation in
Going
Places
the stories that really work
do
have characters with histories, not
lengthy curriculum vitae to place them for us but essentials -they are
Jews, shikses, college graduates or Puerto Rican toughs. Take Sarah Nil–
sin
and Myron BrODsky from the story "Crossbones":
Sarah had Myron Bronsky, gloomy brown eyes, a guitar in his
hands
as
mystical and tearing as, say, Lorca, though Myron's particular
hands derived from dancing, clapping Hasidim; and he had Sarah
Nilsin, Minnesota blonde, long bones, arctic schizophrenia in the
grey infinities of her eyes, and a turn for lyric poems derived from
piratical
saga
masters.
And the end of their short impressive story is Leonard Michaels at his
best:
. . Sarah slammed and smeared the iron down the board as if
increasingly sealed in the momentum of brute work ... Myron was
whispering as
if
to himself that she must hurry and she was turning
from the board and in the same motion hurled the iron, lunging
after it with nails and teeth before it exploded against the wall and
Myron, instantly, hideously understood that the iron, had it struck
him,
had to bum his flesh and break his bones . . . and they were
strapped in bandages, twisted and stiff with pain a week after Sarah's
father didn't arrive and they helped one another walk slowly up the
lteps of the municipal building to buy a marriage license.
