BOOKS
OUT OF THE FIFTIES
I WOULD HAVE SAVED THEM IF I COULD.
By
Leonard Michaels.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux, New York. $7.95.
I WouldHave Saved Them IfI Could,
Leonard Michaels's first work
of ficti on to appear since
Going Places,
which was nominated for the
National Book Award in 1969 , is a much denser, more mature , and more
complex book . I say "work offiction," because this new book is difficult to
classify as a mere collection of short stories , as many reviewers are doing, or
as pieces of a novel or fragmentary novel , such as Gogol gave up to let go
into print, or a personal dialectic of the present world as seen through
Michaels's eyes. There are thirteen separate sections altogether , some of
them broken into smaller sections that are given separate titles within the
encompassing title , as in "Eating Out," "Downers ," or in the remarkable
title piece, "I Would Have Saved Them If! Could," and together they form
a sharply inscribed ideogram of some of our contemporary ambivalences .
The "I" or narrator of much of the book , Phillip Liebowitz, who is
sometimes cast in the third person and appears in other guises, as he did in
Going Places,
but is a consistent character throughout, is a product of the
peculiarities of the fifties , when he came of age . One of the most easily
accessible and humorous sections of the book, "In The Fifties ," is a
compounded litany of the attitudes and mores and meaningful stances and
happenstances of that decade; done in wry pared-down sentences and
compressed paragraphs, it begins : "In the fifties I learned to drive a car. I
was frequently in love . I had more friends than now. " And modulates from
the political/intellectual: "I attended the lectures of the excellent E. B.
Burgum until Senator McCarthy ended his tenure. I imagined N .Y.U.
would burn." To the solipsistic absurd , partly generated, or so one infers ,
