Champagne
Barbara Trapido
Levitation: Five Fictions Cynthia Ozick (Seeker & Warburg £6.95.) Children of the Dark David Batchlor (Seeker & Warburg £6.95.)
Cynthia Ozick's 'fictions' are charac- terised by a bizarre, edgy brilliance and fantastical imagination. Not one of them is like another. One, Shots, is a poignant lyric on mortality in which a woman photo- grapher — attracted to her trade not by aesthetic theory nor by any interest in the camera as machine, but by a 'necromantic' fascination with a series of old sepia Photographs of a woman she calls 'the Brown Girl' — is drawn into a collabora- tion and then into an affair with a professor of history. During a dressing-up lark with the historian's family, innocuous as Louisa Ivlary Alcott, the photographer becomes the Brown Girl. There is an extraordinary sense throughout of the present as past; of the liv- ingas ghosts; of green corrupting to brown.
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liv- ingFrom a Refugee's Notebook, is a coolly funny anthropological satire depic- tin -g vaginal stitching customs among the gallactie Aciremans from the earliest days of the 'stitching harems', innocent as quilting bees, to the practice as manifested in the more complex and stratified society, ,with its entrenched elites, taboos and backlash, menaced by its own technological advance — particularly in the case of the in- destructible `vulva) thread'. The planet of course, spells America backwards. The most dazzling of these fictions are the two which concern a New York Jewish Woman lawyer — Puttermesser — herself too unobtrusively marginal to the sources of Power to be noticed, either by the squash-playing bluebloods for whom she works in the law firm of Midland, Reid and Cockleberry, or by the tainted and in- competent office holders in the Department Of Receipts and Disbursements where she takes her next job. But Puttermesser sees everything; the young Jewish law graduates eating lunch attheir desks out of paper bags because the athletic clubs wont have them, growing yearly more malcontent; the Patronage-eaters filing their nails in their civic warrens of spoils and graft. The story wavers between sharp analysis and wry Pathos as Puttermesser seeks out a past for herself among second-hand memories of
the old shammes and a future in paradise flanked by a blissful box of fudge and a celestial pile of green-bound books from the Crotona Park Branch Library. In the second of these stories Puttermesser, demoted now to make way for the latest mayor's client and deserted by her lover for reading too much Plato in bed, calls up a female go/em. From her bookish know- ledge of Jewish precedent and her longing to have a daughter, she has unwittingly breathed life into a creature of earth and water. (The earth, in this case, is from her departed lover's potted rubber plant.) The golem, growing always larger, as such creatures apparently do, moving with alarming rapidity from vulgar parrot-green trousers to outsize men's overalls from the Army-Navy store, conceives and manages Puttermesser's triumphant mayoral cam- paign. There is a brief, delightful glimpse of New York City as the Garden of Eden before the golem moves to to fulfil her destiny. Though the writer uses the New York Jewish background not so much for easy ethnic laughs as to weave a profound contemporary mythology, she is often very funny. There are the Jewish humorists in Levitation, which is the first and also the least of these stories, who 'go off to studio showings of Screw on Screen on the eve of the Day of Atonement'. There is Putter- messer's wonderful gripe that the golem's prose is 'like a translation from the Middle Finnish'. At its best this book is both visionary and magical.
Nellie Without Hugo is a very good first novel by the biographer of Gertrude Stein, full of sensibility and consciousness in the best sense, never tremulous, never precious, written with an elegant cadence and often with stunning epigrammatic accuracy. It sketches the lives of three sisters over a few weeks. Sara, recumbent, like the Matisse odalisque on Nellie's postcard, bright and emotionally flimsy; Rebecca, propelled by a 'slightly rusting motor of optimism', mak- ing a compromise against loneliness, falling with peculiar and willing affability under the sexual charm of her medicine man; and Nellie, exploring her past with her red-neck teenage lover, back from the past during her husband Hugo's absence, getting it 'right in the end,' as her mother says. The book has the texture of Renoir. A lovely painterly sense of female limbs and soft light. A soft- ness which can never be mistaken for slightness. The conversations between the women are shrewd, fluent and intimate and the men are drawn with delightful, wicked accuracy. There is the eminent art critic, for example, whom Nellie interviews, with his strident down-talk, telling Nellie that Franz Kline was 'one hell of a third base man', bawling loudly at his wife for whisky. And his wife, crushed almost into invisibility by his charisma, is a mere fleeting vision of freckled arm handing the bottle. There is also the memorable Louisa, Nellie's mother, 'survivor of two marriages and dozens of near misses', conferring 'sexual power' upon her three lovely daughters, still turning heads at 60, still in receipt of homage and champagne. Homage and champagne for Miss Hobhouse too for this thought ful, stylish and satisfying book.
In Children of the Dark David Batchelor has told a good story and succeeded in drawing the reader into sympathy with the unlovely Mallow family, locked together in emotional coldness. Kay Mallow, stunted by her own lonely, undemonstrative stockbroker-belt childhood, cannot love her daughter and sees the child as contender for her husband's affections. Patrick Mallow's attempts to reassure her result in disaster. In the ensuing, fragile marital reconstruction, the child is the human sacrifice. There is an impressive and terrible coldness in this novel, relieved by some sharp, ironic portraits among the minor characters.
Mary Hobson's book, Poor Tom is about a kind-hearted wife who suffers from an over-developed eagerness to please. She nurtures an unwelcome and gormless guest until he looks set to consume them all. The humour moves from engaging domestic sit- com towards the grotesque as the usurper settles in to arrange his model aeroplane kits and his Mars Bars in the absent son's bedroom with every horrific sign of per- manence. The writer brings home forcefully and amusingly the destructiveness of too much giving.
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