Sylvia

Like another reviewer, I learned about Leonard Michaels just a few weeks ago from the NY Times review of his collected stories. The review piqued my interest; I read the editor's note in the bookstore, which said Michaels would incessantly edit his work for lyrical quality. That's when I knew this was my guy. Constantly searching the plethora of writing available for writers I can learn from, who care about the rhythm of the sounds of their words on the page, I was pleasantly surprised to find the full oeuvre of Leonard Michaels republished and ready for consumption. SYLVIA seemed like a good place to start. It was short; it was venerated. I finished the book in a few days. SYLVIA is about the relationship between the narrator and Sylvia, a young college girl the narrator meets in NYC, a few months after he drops out of a literature graduate program. The writing is a fictional memoir, and the narrator's background excuses him for the magic in his prose. For example, a simple look out of his Manhattan apartment window produces writing like this: "Trucks, cars, and trains flashed through the grid of cables, crossing the East River to and from Brooklyn. Freighters progressed slowly, as if in a dream, to and from the ocean. In the sky, squadrons of pigeons made grand loops, and soaring gulls made line drawings...All day and night, from every direction, came the hum of the tremendum." The narrator turns out to have certain mild psychiatric issues; his new lover has major issues never diagnosed. The combined problems, mixed with the cultural mores of the 60's and the familial and Jewish guilt of the era, converge to create problems for the narrator. The end is unexpected but not unlikely. SYLVIA, which reads sort of like an autobiographical novella, (this opinion is based on the obituaries I've read of Michaels -- obits that I dug up after perusing his stories and needing to know more about this lost talent), one can understand that this book could have been written as a closure to his first marriage. I'm looking forward to reading his collected stories. I will most certainly read THE MEN'S CLUB. Leonard Michaels is what today they would call a "writer's writer." Here is an quote from an essay Michaels wrote for The Partisan Review. If this quote doesn't make you want to go out and read Michaels, then nothing will: "Basic elements of writing -- diction, grammar, tone, imagery, the patterns of sound made by your sentences -- will say a good deal about you (whether you are conscious of it or not) so that it is possible for you to be writing about yourself before you even know you are writing about yourself. Regardless of your subject, these basic elements, as well as countless and immeasurable qualities of mind, are at play in your writing and will make your presence felt to a reader as palpably as your handwriting. You virtually write your name, as it were, before you literally sign your name, every time you write." These ideas of Michaels' reso

An intense and tragic story based on reality. It is about a man who married a woman whose demons were trying to consume her. He saw no other way.

I came across it in the New York Times Book Review (6.10.07) and mean to read it. I don't know how to rate it, but the review suggests a high rating. All I've read by Michaels is "The Men's Club," which disappointed me, but apparently it's far from his best work. Meanwhile, here is what the reviewer, Mona Simpson, wrote about "Sylvia": "Michaels's later work, much of it published by the small, independent Mercury House, contains his greatest writing. At 129 pages, the reissue of "Sylvia," though billed as a novel, has the power and the rawness of memoir. It's clear that Sylvia Bloch's suicide haunted Michaels throughout his writing life. "Manikin," the first story in his first collection, is about a Jewish undergraduate's suicide. Told in Michael's nervy, fast, taunting sentences, the story links her death to her rape by a Turkish student and to her fiancé's chilling response. At the end, the only expression of sorrow is the Turk's cursing and wailing. "Despite the years that passed between Bloch's death and Michaels's working and reworking of the material, "Sylvia" feels unresolved. The narrator doesn't seem to grasp his own role in his very troubled young wife's despair, and seems unable to understand how things he did or didn't do might have affected her. He can only watch her descent and grieve. "Sylvia" is told plainly -- there are no pyrotechnics, few literary allusions, no dead elder relatives. With this suicide, Michaels had a tragedy as intractable as his grandparents', as flabbergasting, and all his own. He'd been given his obsession early, in the form of love, and like Ahab he chased it all his life. "Though finally not as realized as Peter Handke's great memoir, "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams," about his mother's suicide, "Sylvia" nonetheless resonates with the grim misery -- childlike, plaintive and endlessly circular -- of incomprehensible loss. Had Michaels lived longer, one feels, "Sylvia" would have endured another revision. Michaels will be remembered for his stories --"Manikin," "Murderers," "City Boy," "Going Places" -- along with "A Girl With a Monkey," "Honeymoon," "Tell Me Everything" -- and the seven astonishing Nachman stories, which transpire without sex as they chronicle the life of a gifted Santa Monica mathematician who keeps house alone. These stories consider moral problems freshly. All the ornament seems burned off, purified; the narratives distilled and gorgeously plain, as only a great stylist's can become. Less crackling than the earlier work, they're smoother in the mouth, stark in form. Michaels was writing more Nachman stories when he died. If finished and published together, they might have made a novel. As it is, they're seven irregular beauties, to be read again and again."

From SYLVIA: "Then, from behind long black bangs, her eyes moved, looked at me. The question of what to do with my life was resolved for the next four years. Sylvia was slender and suntanned. Her hair fell below the middle of her back. Long bangs obscured her eyes, making her look shy or modestly hiding, and also shorter than average. She was five-six. Her eyes, black as her hair, were quick and brilliant. She had a high fine neck, wide shoulders, narrow hips, delicately shaped wrists and ankles. Her figure and the smooth length of her face, with its wide sensuous mouth, reminded me of Egyptian statuary." She reminds me of a girl I knew named Covi Lopez. (Except for the bit about the wide sensuous mouth. Covi is something of a lipless wonder.) When you see these kind of girls, your immediate reaction is: Thomas Aquinas, go take a hike. You're absolutely useless. Because there's only 2 legitimate proofs for the existence of God. The Argument from the Design of Covi Lopez. The Argument from the Design of Sylvia Bloch. From SYLVIA: "There were moments when we'd happen to look up at each other while sitting a few yards apart in a crowded subway train, or across a room at a party, or in the slow flow of drugged conversation with four others in our living room, the gray dawn beginning to light the windows, and we'd smile with our eyes, as if we were embarrassed by our luck, having each other."