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PARTISAN REVIEW
which point the "girl" whispers , " 'Get the claw off me, motherfucker , or
I'll kick your balls!' " (Isn't this off? Wouldn 't anybody who uses "mother-
fucker" say "kick you in the nuts ," or are transvestites this peculiar even in
speech?) Liebowitz goes out to the street , gets into a cab and hears its meter
l
ticking-another detail that will occur at the book's end-as though
toward the shortening of his life, and then the driver says, "
'Where,
mister. ' " Liebowitz answers , " 'Nowhere .' "
Which echoes the reiterated refrain of Didi and Gogo and would be
the end of a Hemingway piece, but Michaels, like Liebowitz, fortunatel y,
perhaps , for our enlightenment , goes a bit further. The driver says to
Liebowitz that this is costing him money ; he can sit in the park for free. To
which Liebowitz , recognizing in the "smug, annoyed superiority of the
driver's tone" Manhattan's theme, replies, " 'I want to pay . Shut up .' "
And , echoing the tone he's heard, brings the other side ofhimselffull circle
again .
I
This is indicative of the ambivalences that dreamers and moralists are
strung upon, and part of the complex point that Michaels is trying to make
.
in his nearly faultlessly organized second book. How does Trotsky , in
"Trotsky's Garden" (apparently a parody of Barthelme's "Tolstoy's
Museum ," while at the same time functioning as a self-contained mantrap) ,
for example, justify the number of deaths that have followed in his wake ,
largely due to his unshakable faith in his and Marx's and Engel's dialectical
materialism? What has Trotsky learned of the soul of materialistic or
merely common man? Trotsky, in Michaels's version, is in Mexico, in exile ,
staring out at his sunlit garden, which will be incorporated into his prose,
as he writes of dialectical materialism . Meanwhile, "Dialectical
materialism, " Michaels writes , " in the heart of the day , draws a pickax from
its raincoat ." Trotsky is hit from behind in the head by the man in the
raincoat, but manages , being who he is, to bite his assassin's hand and fling
himself over his desk , ro write, " 'On hot days in Mexico beware of
raincoats.
Michaels has been compared by some reviewers ro Barthelme, but has
Barthelme , using the detritus of history or any of the absurd manifestations
of contemporaneity he handles so well, ever made such a bloodily succinct
point, except , possibly, in the "A Manual For Sons" section of his most
recent
The Dead Father?
Michaels's and Barthelme's periodical publica–
tions, most of which are later gathered into their books, have appeared
nearly concurrently over the years , and Michaels is, at this writing , for his
illimitable exuberance, forty-three ; Barthelme is forty-five . In many ways ,
in terms of influence , it seems surely possible that Michaels has touched on
Barthelme as much as Barthelme on Michaels, especially since Barthelme
