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PARTISAN REVIEW
by the new availability ofhallllcinogenic drugs:"J listened to long conver–
sations about the phenomenological weirdness of familiar reality and the
great spiritual questions this entailed -for example, 'Do you think Wallace
Stevens is a head?' " To slapstick : "I had a fight with a powerful fat man
who fell on my face and was immovable." To the narrator's attending a
protest demonstration in San Francisco, his first: "I walked beside a little
kid who had a bag ofmarbles to throw under the hoofs of the horse cops. His
mot:,er kept saying, 'Not yet, not yet. ' We marched all day. That was the
end of the fifties." Which is the end of that section.
Dependent upon this period in American history, or decadence, and
the narrator's upbringing, which began in Brooklyn and was generally
among his family of recently emigrated Russian and Polish Jews, is the
supposition that it is a dog-eat-dog world, or you are what you eat, to use a
more seventyish phrase, or will become what you assimilate and consume.
In "Eating Out," this premise is developed in the most interrelated,
logical, and frightening way-though much of the book is frightening; a
kind of intellectual mind rape-and if relentlessness can be called a defect, I
would say that Michaels's book, in nailing down its dialectic, suffers from
its relentlessness, though sometimes I wish a few others would.
Babel is obviously Michaels's literary mentor, but it often seems that
Hemingway is a favorite sounding board, the Americanized side of
Michaels's fascination with violence, suicide, and death (which has "eat" at
its center), and perhaps a bi t ofa patriarchal scourge, bei ng antiintellectual ,
a tyrant in most matters, and a fellow practictioner of the short sentence
with the kick-back of a pistol shot; but then Hemingway was writing
within his circumscribed limits, partly self-imposed, and place and time,
and we have yet to define our own, if not some aspects of time itself. Some of
the brilliant passages in this book help to do just that.
In "Murderers," for instance, which calls to mind "The Killers," the
narrator, Phillip, begins riding the subway after his uncle dies of a heart
attack: "My family came from Poland, then never went anyplace until they
had heart attacks, " which is what Phillip, at least in a metaphorical sense,
seems stricken with . He rides thousands ofmiles, mostly underground (this
will later surface in a submarine image of Kafka in "Storytellers, Liars, and
Bores"), on the New York City subway system, and one day some friends
come up as he's scraping his heel on a curb (this troublesome foot -
satyriasis? - reappears in "Annabella's Hat," through the person of Lord
Byron, in "HelloJack," "The Captain," and elsewhere in more subtle forms),
and mention that the rabbi is headed for home, walking fast, which means to
them that he's about to have intercourse with his wife.
The boys go up to a rooftop, and on up to the roof ofa water tank, from
