by Mark Jay Mirsky
The editors at Fiction thought it might be worthwhile for me to comment on stories that we published in the current issue so as to give readers of our Web page an incentive to find the magazine in bookstores or to subscribe. At the same moment a note came in from a writer whom I prize and whose work I teach, Cynthia Ozick, and she has given me permission to print it here. Since she has mentioned my story, “On Account of an Apple,” her comment will suffice.
"On Account of an Apple" in the new Fiction (for which my thanks always and always) is wittily and lyrically juicy, and its social and psychological reach (the wedding, the variety of guests, the ketuba!) is thickened by the ardor of your whirling prose. Mazel tov! A glorious story. And in the same issue, not one but two bonuses (boni?)—Dalia Rosenfeld (Alvin's daughter, now a citizen of Israel, as you probably know), and (this gave me particular gratification, aware of how happy its publication makes him) the dark, dark Mario Materassi story. As editor, you have the power to make writers happy! As writer, you have the power to make readers happy!
Cynthia Ozick
Readers opening the current issue of Fiction, Number 61, will recognize with pleasure two stories that were noted in the book review featured on the front page of the Sunday Times Book Review, the complete collected work of Primo Levi, generally acknowledged as one of the most, if not the most, important writers who emerged from the nightmare of the Holocaust and were able to write about it in lucid, unsentimental prose. This is not the first time Primo Levi’s stories have been printed in English translation in the pages of Fiction. Two stories arrived without any fanfare or even reference to Primo Levi’s life or the recognition his work had already received in Italy. I recognized, however, the genius in these pages as an editor and a fellow writer. I asked for both of them, and in the interim between the printing of one, “The Juggler” in 1983 (Volume 7, Nos. 1&2) and the other, “The Gypsy” in 1985 (Volume 7, No 3, Volume 8, No 1) our Italian issue, Primo Levi in a sense burst upon the American scene and I had to resist efforts at Simon and Schuster to withdraw the second story, which had already been set in type.
I was to meet Primo Levi at a reception for him at the Jewish Museum. Saul Bellow was at my side (I was trying to importune Saul either to give us another piece or to translate a story for us from the Yiddish, but Bellow laughed good-naturedly and quipped that since Isaac Singer had fired him, he had lost his taste for translating. We both went up to try to speak with Levi but his translator seemed strangely indifferent to our wishes and Levi seemed withdrawn into his own language. The translator asked if I could speak Italian and with a foolhardy bravura, since I had been working on Dante’s Commedia and could hear the laughter in the Italian with the aid of the translation on the other side, I shook my head in the affirmative. A few sentences addressed to me by Levi in rapid Italian quickly exposed my limitations. Levi shot me a withering look of disappointment and walked on into the room while I withdrew into the obscurity of a corner. I have heard that Levi felt that Bellow had ignored him when they were introduced and I told one of Primo Levi’s biographers that I wondered if it was at the same reception, where both of us found ourselves spurned, not for lack of a wish to communicate but because the translator remained a passive spectator to our efforts and Levi probably did not understand the situation. In any case, when Robert Weil told me that Norton was bringing out the collected works of Primo Levi this fall, I immediately asked if we could have stories for the magazine. I was allowed to choose several from a limited selection, but among them I found two that not only represent Levi at his best, but demonstrate the range of his prose. “Vilmy” blends science fiction with the adult fairy tale and reminds me of Hawthorne’s experiments in this form. It touches the boundaries of man and the animal, but also the pages of antiquity, the attractions of an erotic understanding between the world of what we think of as nature and what men and women imagine as their exclusive reality. “Weekend” references the coming nightmare of the Holocaust but with a light humor that only intensifies the sense of the horror coming on.
Mario Materassi, the Italian critic who was the close friend of the American writer Henry Roth and the first translator of his work into another language, told me that he was delighted to find himself in the company of Primo Levi in this issue. I first read “End of the Road” many years ago when I met Mario at a conference on the work of Henry Roth. At first I thought it would be perfect for a magazine in the Southwest, since that is the terrain of its narrative, but my candidate for its publication went out of print, and as I was reluctant to send it back, it sat for a while by my desk. I couldn’t shake its evocation of evil which had moved several other editors at the magazine.
Mauricio Montiel Figueiras’s “The Man in Tweed” is excerpted from a literary experiment as the reader will discover from the author’s note at the back of the issue. Despite his international reputation, Montiel, following the tradition of the 19th century novel published in installments, has released pieces of this on Twitter. I felt immediately through Suzanne Jill Levine’s sharp translation how the mystery of the man’s identity flashed into a riddle that had its own justification as a short story though it belongs to a much longer narrative.
In praising Jorge Volpi’s very funny but acute tale of Fidel Castro’s psychoanalysis by a follower of Lacan, I have to again thank Suzanne Jill Levine, who brought the author to my attention, for helping find an excerpt that would give some sense of An End to Madness, the larger novel from which we extracted these passages. Again the biographical notes will give some sense of Volpi’s reputation as one of the most important contemporary Mexican novelists.
“Hard Rock” by Austin Smith in its first reading struck me as having just the right voice to render a certain hardscrabble American landscape and it only improved as I read it over in the process of proof reading. “A Famine in the Land,” by Dalia Rosenfeld, by contrast seemed to tickle the intersection between poverty, immigrant reality, and the world of the housewife as surreal. Another story of this clash between the cultures of rural America and immigrant America is vividly portrayed in Jingjing Tian’s tale, ‘The Deer Hunters.” Jingjing, who emigrated from China as a child, has tales of a family that once belonged to Mao’s inner circle, but it is in this Texas backcountry that her prose seems to have taken root.
Smith, Rosenfeld, Tian, I value not just for their narrative but for their striking root in strange American landscapes, and that is what most attracted me to the bewildered adolescents of Jenn Scott’s “Gettysburg,” where two girls who meet in the eighth grade try to make sense of themselves, their mothers, their opposing worlds. The clash is reflected in Scott’s title, the place of the famous Civil War battle, which the two friends are forced to visit as they graduate high school, under the wing of one of the mothers. Another fine story that gives a vivid portrait of American life, this time from the perspective of a mother is Sean Clemmons’ “Aim Low.” Dealing with the stress of raising two children with a husband who seems more absent than present, and the death of their favorite pet, Brian the Hamster, she finds her sense of self in an unexpected assault by neighboring teenagers. The exasperation and laughter of Clemmon’s story is balanced with such skill as to make it irresistible.
One of the most challenging pieces in the issue is Joseph McElroy’s “Court of Last Opinion.” Fiction has been publishing McElroy’s work since 1978 (Volume 5, Nos. 2&3). He is one of the few American writers that Donald Barthelme, a founding editor of Fiction, considered a peer. In the best sense Joseph McElroy’s prose challenges the idea of fiction, what it can say, what its language can provoke in the imagination. Donald struggled with the form of the novel—for the short story seemed to perfectly suit his methods of narrative, though that judgment may just show the limits of my own critical powers. On the other hand Joseph McElroy in novels like A Smuggler’s Bible and Actress in House has an unerring sense of the possibilities of the novel’s plot, though he is equally at home in shorter forms. I reviewed his brilliant novella Taken from Him on Amazon Books, which is available in electronic form there and which I consider a dazzling tour de force. Likewise, “Court of Last Opinion” covers the landscape of a novel in a scant twenty-five pages but manages to evoke in its witty language a stinging critique of corporate America, a dazzling mix of scientific speculation and fantastic possibility, and the mystery of conspiracy as challenged by youthful hope. I am going to quote in its entirety a note sent by Gregg Biglieri, a lecturer in English at Buffalo State, SUNY (“Sleepy with Democracy” Cuneiform, “You Dig” on Robert Creeley’s Poetics, “Moods Don’t Swing” on Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony) to McElroy after its publication in Fiction because it gives some sense of a poet and critic grappling with the text.
My experience of reading Court of Last Opinion. When I saw the capitalization of the word “Thing,” I started to imagine that you would be writing an allegory of the supreme court decision on some kind of abstract level, without remembering that everything you write is concretely engaged in interaction with actual things. I drifted off to thinking allegory (as allos agoreuein, to speak outside the marketplace) as discourse used to speak in times of political strife, a way of speaking both publicly and privately at the same time given acute political constraints. Which I don't think is too far off the mark in terms of private/public binary and sense of granting the concept of personhood to corporations. I guess I'm just trying to get at my ways into the story. As I tried to sleep that night I kept rearranging words in my head around the allos agoreuein and came to allos-agoraphobia, which made me bring together the idea of the uncomfortable sensation that one would have when one is “in the marketplace” and when one is speaking outside the marketplace (privately) in one's own head. Which turns me to the invention of speaking/light (twist on voir/dire?) which is able to get at one's private thoughts and make them public. Then I was struck at the fact that when we look back to 50s Cold War paranoia it's so easy for us to critique blatant forms of manipulating fear and yet here we are, what, sixty years later and the sense of paranoia now just seems live everyday reality. Thinking of this in relation to your lensmaker, made me jump from “phobia” to “fovea” to fovea centralis and to focal point, and think back to how the story increasing[ly] concentrates on the actual mechanisms behind the real sense of actively working surveillance that certainly justifies a more precise rather than a vague sense of paranoia, until I got to the statement that actively working paranoia is the phobia centralis of your story, at least one focal point, but at least I've marked out a sufficiently expansive area in which to locate my blind spot, and I was able to fall asleep.
Without endorsing all the abstract possibilities here, I would agree that “Court of Last Opinion” is “concretely engaged in interaction with actual things.” I have heard Joseph speak about the importance of water in the world and the mystery of water is at the heart of this long short story and its meditation on American capitalism at its best and worst as we experience it now. It is also, however, a story full of unexpected twists and turns, with a romantic heart, laughing prose, that rewards readers who love to untangle a good mystery or detective tale.
This was supposed to be a short preview at the request of Kristen Hamelin Tracey, our managing editor, but it’s hard to just skip about. Dennis McFadden takes us to an Irish landscape and also to the sharp sensibilities of that world where fecklessness becomes amusing despite itself. Likewise Jessica Falzoi’s “Visitors” locates exactly a kind of shifting world of young Germans where no one is quite who they seem and assumptions about visitors will turn quickly upside-down.
To characterize the landscape in Jill Birdsall’s story about a Latin translator in the Vatican who tries to supervise his children’s upbringing through letters home to America as “bizarre” does not do justice to its teasing of reality and nature of the family revolt. Jon-Lewis Katz’s ability to evoke a New York City landscape of Brooklyn and Queens pain and poverty, and a beach on that forbidding tract of water, the East River, drew me to the story, “The Beach on a December Day.” It skillfully details the pressures on a young girl of West Indian extraction coming to sexual maturity as her parents’ marriage wobbles and she tries to maintain friendship with a dying schoolmate.
Lissa Weinstein is both an editor at the magazine and a writer characteristically modest about her work. We have published her before in Fiction No. 56 but hearing “What is the Extent of the Damage” a year ago downtown at a public reading while she was still working on the story, I begged her to submit it. It is humorous and yet heartbreaking as the personal and imaginative transformation of a nightmare into a form of fantasy.
Addendum
Joseph McElroy sent me this wonderful appreciation of Mark Mirsky's "On Account of An Apple," and with his permission, I am reprinting it here. --Kristen Hamelin Tracey, Managing Editor
When it is all obvious (this apple) -- except to the character -- the tale will go its way, even his. And the paper about to burst into flame under the impress of a passionate pen, the New Age - Orthodox wedding fiddles streaking resin down their strings in fiery trails, the waterspout of intoxication for the young, the catering hall ceiling falling away to the far-off stars, even unto Dostoevsky and Babel unwilling unable to stop whatever suffering may be a key to consciousness, all the Mirsky richness also comes back to a "separation of men and women" less like a pride of lions than the lonely young officer's longing in Chekhov's "The Kiss" -- and what is also obvious to Mark's reader: that the student writer in her odd, even perhaps impenetrable story and in her very own sincerity has given the teacher her "youthful heart."
--Joseph McElroy