TO MAKE A LONG STORY SHORT
TEITLEBAUM'S WINDOW. By Wallace Markfield. Knopf. $6.95.
STANDI NG FAST. By Harvey Swados. Doubleday. $8.95.
SINGLE FILE. By Norman Fruchter. Knopf. $5.95.
To tell a story, it seems to me, is the reason for fiction. Social
propaganda; documentary (see the world as it was then, is now) ; psy–
chiatric sketch; experiment with language: all these are abuses of story
(the last seems least) which overwhelm or distract the reader. To tell
the tale therein is not easy in a TV culture which gobbles up informa–
tion, sentimentalizes over instant sympathies - diets, ecology, Blacks,
Indians - its reading habits increasingly tied to the attention span called
upon by three-minute commercials or, at best, the twelve-minute movie
fragments sandwiched between them.
Doom echoes in the voices of editors as they speak to you (con–
fidentially) of the future of the novel. Bookstores which seem to be
bent on warehousing bric-a-brac for birthdays and anniversaries are
refusing to put out most new fiction. And the underground audience
trades catchwords, mumbles slogans of brotherhood, not interested in
telling their own stories, let alone listening to others. (One hitcher I
recently picked up riding across Colorado enthused about his bag of
dynamite grass, "Wow, it's so good, it wipes you out from one word
to the next. I mean you can't see the end of your sentence!")
This is a bleak view - that except for a few zen formulas, we are
beyond sentence, paragraph and, of course, story.
I choose to think not. I believe that the TVs are going to be blink–
ing off one by one in households soon, that many will be coming home
from the long trip, that there is already a hunger for stories, those
analogue narratives by which we entertain and learn about ourselves–
stories, the word dream dance of extended experience.
And since the American dream has been so rudely shattered in the
last generation, it is not difficult to return to tribal literature and con–
sider three logs of modem J ewish experience,
Teitlebaum's Window,
by
Wallace Markfield,
Standing Fast,
by Harvey Swados and Norman
Fruchter's
Single File.
Do we tar these writers by categorizing them as "Jewish"? Defiantly
parochial myself, I see it as no slur. A Belgian playwright, De Ghelde–
rode, spoke of trying to create out of that necessarily narrow
back.-
