A Girl with a Monkey: New and Selected Stories

I kept looking for new books by Leonard Michaels and then was crushed to hear he'd passed away. This book like his others draws me close and strangles me with ever new lessons about the dangers of intimacy, portrayed through his protagonists' relations with differently deranged women and one's compulsive attraction toward them. There is a sense his stories are happening in the late twentieth century but if Socrates happened to pop up in one of them and said, about marriage, "My advice to you is to get married. If you find a good wife, you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher," it would seem perfectly contemporaneous with what Michaels seems to be saying. Plus ca change...

What's amazing about Michaels is how seamlessly he transitioned from an experimental realist to a master of the realistic short story form. His early stories are marked by a linguistic self-apparency, though he's funny enough to keep it interesting. And, unlike others in this vein, his style is blatantly influenced by Kafka and Beckett. Sometimes the description in the early stories can be too thick, exhausting the possibilites of each situation. The language in the best of them, however - "In The Fifties," "Manikin" (The one about the Turk, I think) - have a wonderful interplay of signifiers, like poetry. "In The Fifties" is an ironized (sp.) list poem in the style of Ginsberg's "Howl".The later stories acheive such a transparency you can forget how funny they are. Michaels is a master of form. They are narrated in a natural, subdued manner, unlike the glossy, journalistic style we get from some of our other first tier writers. The differentiated narrative strands merge together gradually as the story progresses.Thematically, Michaels' stories are interesting because they are often set on the cusp of the sexual revolution, and there is much confusion about gender roles in relationships. All in all, one of the best books I've read in awhile.