482
MARK MIRSKY
hopelessly bourgeois, the girl cutesy, silly, but so is Simon. Adept at
squeezing, pinching, petting, the "Second-Highest-in-Achievement-Test–
Kid" goes into shock at the thought of real intimacy. He flees back to
the familiar, comfortable insanity of his parents, joins the army, that
band of permanent infants. Is it because this marriage is a dead end?
Or is it because Simon is disabled? By parodying the girl and her
family, the Grossbergs, as "gross," the author leaves the answer
ambiguous.
Markfield as a writer is a man somewhat distracted by his own
gifts. There is the professional funny man who can poke at the mores
of the New York Jews, rabble and intellectuals - for which the
applause is easy. Yet there are moments in his fiction of more power–
ful import to me: the mountainous pretzel woman who appears out of
the graveyard air in
To An Early Grave,
overpowering his hero and
enslaving him to her endless, penurious task; the grotesque anger which
poisons the life of his protagonist in
The Decline of Sholem Waldman;
the crazy imagination of Adrian Levy in
Teitlebaum's Window
trying
to create poetry out of the bleak possibilities of his employment agency.
In these apparitions there is horror and beauty, a true telling of the
dreadful imaginings of our Brooklyn tribe.
Single File,
Norman Fruchter's novel, is far away from any formal
ties, either in coloration or style, with the traditional Jewish novel. Yet
so is modern Judaism and this journal of a social worker trying to
find some sense of order, meaning, to his work, life, in the chaotic
Black, Italian, Puerto Rican slums of New York City is a fine rendering
of a familiar world: those countless contemporaries and students who
have gone into the welfare departments of America, half out of a
secular ethical commitment, half out of despair at their prospects in
the arts or professions. Fruchter's voice is quite good, crisp, staccato, no
overwriting here. The problem with the book is simple. Rather than
staying within the consciousness of his hero, the social worker, whose
dilemma Fruchter notes impeccably, sexual boredom, intellectual im–
potence, despair before the hopelessness of the poverty he ministers to,
the novelist tries to move into the head of an Am-Ha-Aretz, Matto, an
Italian laborer who is drawn to the senseless killing that is (supposed
to be) at the center of the novel's tale.
No, it doesn't work. The construct is careful and painstaking but
It'S
papier-mache. There is no real sympathy, love, hate; and the book
is burdened with tasteful artificial chapters fleshing' out Matto. The
energy that ought to have gone into understanding the social worker
IS
wasted trying to penetrate a blockhead.
The best moments in
Single File
come in its final chapters where,
