130
PARTISAN REVIEW
the November 13, 1975 issue of
The New York Review of Books.
I Would Have Saved Them IfI Could
is a carefully constructed statement
about our times, in our time, movingly developed, and each of its sections,
interlocking and precise, progress to prepare us for the final one, "The
Captain," which could be the culmination of an elaborate novel. The levels
of language, bargaining , usury , cannibalism, pseudo-moralism, moralism ,
fractured consciousness , and pertinent surrealism that permeate this piece,
set at a publisher's party, as each character in the cast of minorities runs or
shuffles or limps or fornicates around to find the ultimate big bang to blow
away his or her g rievance that the others present, opposed to him, mistrust
(as well they might), is too complex to have the space here
to
begin to
define. Michaels's book must be read as a whole.
As a whole, it is a luminous presentation of the density of an organized
and assimilating mind , and though the relentlessness I've mentioned might
be difficult for some to cope with, Michaels's short, strong, poetic sentences
stand forth with a moral courage not to be found in the treacly , etiolated,
and commercial prose of many of his contemporaries, not including, of
course, Barthelme or Roth. His world, which fortunately isn 't devoid of a
resilient humor that can elicit bellylaughs and compassion, is both brutal and
generously kind to the brutalized. He is the boy in "Murderers" who has
fallen from the water tank, the Icarus of myths, the observer who's experi–
enced secondhand the horror of the fall, and he is also the enraged rabbi and
the enraged rabbi's wife being spied upon - all those whose relationships
have been changed because of the complexity of the response, not
to
say the
fall, which has been recorded by the moralist who perceives with emotion,
the man with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.
LARRY WOIWODE
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