|
|
April 6, 2012
Relating to the stories told
Creating characters for which readers care is not an easy task.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
The Independent reviewed a variety of fiction for this Passover, mostly novels but one collection of short stories. Perhaps because of an inherent bias – the protagonist of the short stories is a newspaperman – it is the latter that most impressed this reviewer.
“I’ve been working on a series of stories about the character I call ‘my father’ – loosely based on my own father – for about thirty years,” writes author Dave Margoshes in the afterword of A Book of Great Worth (Coteau Books, 2012). “Over that time, many of them have been published in magazines and several in previous short story collections. I had no intention of doing a series, but I liked that first story – it was ‘The False Moustache’ – a lot and wondered if I could use the character in other situations. The story had begun with a spark of truth – a story my father had told many times about a foolish man he’d once known – and the spirit of my father, who had died a couple of years earlier. I had a number of such yarns from my father rattling around in my head, and I soon wrote several more of my own ‘versions.’ Gradually, over many years, I began to think I might have enough of these tales eventually to fill a book.”
That first story, about how the narrator’s father helps a young woman impregnated by an acquaintance of his from his days in Cleveland, was first published in 1985. Set in New York, to where both men had returned in the mid-1920s, it is representative of the structure of most of the 12 other stories in this collection. The narrator’s father, Harry Morgenstern, who works at a Yiddish daily newspaper in New York City (though we “meet” him before he gets that job), finds himself in a moral dilemma, generally of someone else’s making (but not always), and he must negotiate himself and/or others through the situation.
Margoshes writes with great affection and respect for his father – and for his mother, when she is part of the story, and, frankly, for all of his “characters,” even the schlemiels. Not only are the stories touching portraits of a good man, but also of New York, Yiddish journalism and life in the 1920s and ’30s. They will evoke feelings of nostalgia in readers whose parents weren’t even born yet in those decades. A Book of Great Worth lives up to its name.
Nostalgia also plays a large part in Halbman Steals Home (Dundurn Press, 2012). Author B. Glen Rotchin, like Margoshes, dedicates his book to his father. Perhaps Rotchin at least partially based his main character, Mort Halbman – described in the promotional material as “a crotchety, divorced, 65-year-old garment manufacturer who laments losing the one true love of his life: the Montreal Expos” – on his father. And, perhaps this is why Mort’s behavior is more tempered and, therefore, his character more likable than one might expect from such a description. Some reviewers have lamented the fact that Mort verges upon, but doesn’t achieve, the level of curmudgeonly behavior of, for example, many of Mordechai Richler’s protagonists, but this reviewer appreciated a less grumpy old man.
Readers meet Mort as he makes yet another return trip to see the burnt remains of the home he built in 1969 – not coincidentally the Expos’ first year – in the Montreal suburb of Hampstead. The home was “literally pieced together, stone by stone, out of the heart of the city,” as it incorporated limestone from Mont-Royal, sections of which were then being blasted so that the University of Montreal could build a new sports complex. As went the Expos’ fortunes – the franchise met its demise in 2004, when the team was moved to Washington, D.C., and renamed the Nationals – so went Mort’s life. The difference is that Mort still has a chance to redeem himself in the city that he loves and with the people he loves, mainly his two adult children.
Halbman Steals Home is an easy read, written with humor and with some fun plot twists. Unfortunately, not all of these twists are well supported by what comes before, so there are a couple of surprises in the latter portion of the book for which no groundwork was laid and, therefore, they don’t fit into the book’s tone or storyline. On the whole, however, Rotchin has written a charming homage to his father (perhaps), Montreal and the Expos.
Another parent who must come to terms with their children is Miriam Gold (née Bluestein), the stage mother from just outside of Hell who is the central character in Alan Shapiro’s first novel – though not first book – Broadway Baby (Algonquin Books, 2012).
The novel’s “overture” encapsulates Miriam’s personality. “Clutching her playbill” she follows “the usher through the golden doors and down the carpeted centre aisle.” She takes in every sound and sight, including Mayor Guiliani, who has seats in the row behind her and her family. She is anticipating the payoff from all the years that she took her son – kicking and screaming – to lessons. She is “almost hyperventilating,” when her other son puts his hand on hers and points, “‘Ma,’ he said, ‘take it easy; he’s one of the cops, he’s there, right there, to the right of the star, a little behind him.’” In her disbelief, she rifles through the pages of the playbill again and again, looking for her son’s name, which must be there, so intent on finding his name that she misses every instance of his performance.
Miriam, of course, wanted to be a star herself, but, when that didn’t happen, for various reasons, not the least of which was her own mother, who was as disinterested in raising Miriam (she left that job to Miriam’s grandparents) as Miriam is obsessively involved in trying to shape her son Ethan’s life. Miriam pays little heed to her husband and other two children, Sam and Julie, who would watch Miriam as she took Ethan to his lessons: “They would watch them fight and go. They sang, too, but thank God not as well as Ethan.”
With such brevity, Shapiro communicates so much information, and this is one of the delights of Broadway Baby. As perhaps surprisingly interesting as Miriam’s story is – after all, she dreamed from childhood of greatness and lives what, by all intents and purposes, is an ordinary life – is the way in which Shapiro uses language. He is an observer, as is Miriam, who is always concerned with what things will look like to others, but, unlike Miriam, he is not afraid of connecting to what is going on within. He’s not afraid – at least in his writing – of intimacy, and this allows readers to get closer to Miriam than she, no doubt, would find comfortable if she were a real person, making it possible to empathize with a character who could easily have been a one-dimensional caricature.
Unfortunately, such facility and economy with language isn’t exhibited by Alice Hoffman in her latest novel, The Dovekeepers (Scribner 2011). Granted, the subject matter is of a grander scale – an imagining of the siege of Masada in 70 CE from the viewpoints of four fictional women – but this doesn’t save the story. Inserting women into an historical record that omits them isn’t new ground, otherwise Hoffman’s account might have been more compelling, at least for its novelty.
Hoffman was inspired to write The Dovekeepers by a visit to Masada. She writes in the Scribner reading group guide online, “Once in a lifetime, a book may come to a writer as an unexpected gift. The Dovekeepers is such a book for me. It was a gift from my great-great-grandmothers, the women of ancient Israel who first spoke to me when I visited the mountain fortress of Masada,” which was “a spiritual experience so intense and moving I felt as though the lives that had been led there 2,000 years earlier were utterly fresh and relevant.... In that great silence, standing inside the mystery that is the past, surrounded by the sorrow of the many deaths that occurred there, I also felt surrounded by life and by the stories of the women who had been there. In that moment, The Dovekeepers came to life as well.”
Given such noble intent and mission of purpose, it is especially difficult to say that The Dovekeepers is not a great book. The foundations are there: the story of Masada, as written in the first century by historian Flavius Josephus in The Jewish War; and four female main characters who sound fascinating – Yael, the daughter of an assassin who never forgave her for her mother’s death in childbirth; Revka, a baker’s wife, who witnessed her daughter’s brutal murder by Roman soldiers, as did her two grandchildren, who were rendered mute by the horror; Aziza, who was raised as a boy for her own safety and became a warrior like her father; and Aziza’s mother, Shirah, a medicine woman who has an intimate (and dangerous) relationship to the leader of the rebels at Masada.
At a minimum, The Dovekeepers needed a better editor, one who would have insisted on some variation in the tone used by the four different storytellers; limited the repetition of certain metaphors, such as the many that connect Yael with lions (she was born under the sign of the lion and readers are not allowed to forget it); reworked or cut out some of the didactic explanations for various Jewish practices and the like; and calmed down the language so that the characters could have spoken like real women. The mythology of Masada is epic enough – Hoffman needn’t have tried quite so hard to make her version of it sound larger-than-life. By doing so, she unintentionally creates an emotional distance, which will prevent most readers from caring much whether her characters live or die when the Romans finally lay siege to the fortress.
Whereas Hoffman’s cumbersome and ineffective language turns a potentially appealing story into a somewhat dull one, David Schmahmann writes extremely well but is better at style than storytelling – or, perhaps more accurately, the story he chooses to tell in The Double Life of Alfred Buber (Permanent Press, 2011) just didn’t interest this reviewer. Other readers might enjoy its perversity – other reviewers of The Double Life of Alfred Buber highlight the writer’s invocations of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita and T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” as well as George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
Schmahmann’s protagonist is a born loser in love, who manages to succeed professionally – he becomes a lawyer who can afford the house, the car, etc. – and has the outward appearance of a cultured gentleman. However, he leads a double life, as the book’s title indicates, though it’s more like a triple life. There is his colleagues’ and community’s view of him, there is his own idea of who he is and what is going on, then there is what actually is happening to him and the people around him – in particular to Nok, the Thai prostitute with whom Buber falls in love on a trip to Bangkok, where he went as a sex tourist. Schmahmann blurs the lines between reality and fantasy in this tale of a lonely, sad soul who creates his own demise. But, as with Hoffman’s characters – though for totally different reasons – many readers just won’t care what happens to Buber.
^TOP
|
|
