BOOKS
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and history exams in the secondary schools have been cancelled alto–
gether until textbooks can be rewritten . In praising this decision,
Izvestia
wrote that history classes had "deluded/ generation after
generation poisoning their minds and souls withjlies." But Gorba–
chev immediately proposed that a special commjision of the Central
Committee should prepare a new Party history. This may well ex–
tend but will not remove the limits of officially sanctioned truth. The
continuous suppression of independent historical research, such as
Utopia in Power,
means that Soviet historians are constrained to repeat
the old lies or, at best, to reinvent the wheel.
VICTOR ZASLAVSY
MISSED CONNECTIONS
BREAK IT DOWN. By Lydia Davis.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
$14.95.
THE PROGRESS OF LOVE. By Alice Munro.
Alfred
A. Knopf. $16.95.
CELEBRATION. By Mary Lee Settle.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
$17.95.
The craft of fiction is honed within an inch of its
I
life in
Lydia Davis's
Break It Down.
These thirty-four austere, concentrated
prose pieces - some of which are stories with something like an
event, some of which are sketches engraved on a surface as tender as
flesh - are at once disorienting and transfixing, much the same effect
life seems to have on the characters in them.
In this title piece, a man whose love affair has broken up tries
to rationalize the financial and emotional cost by breaking down the
expenses of his only extended escapade with his lover in an unde–
scribed hotel. He computes the cost of the airfare and the hotel and
meals first, against the number of times they made love per day on
the average, and then begins to qualify this simple equation by the
number of hours they took to make love. He then insists to himself
that "it's not really one hundred dollars a shot because it goes on all
day,"
"it"
being the state of ongoing physical craving for his lover
which, he realizes in the next paragraph, after having reached a
figure of six dollars an hour, goes on even while sleeping, in fact,
even after they have parted, even after the pictures in memory have
begun to fade, even after there are only a few "dry little questions"
