Customer Reviews

Sylvia: A Novel

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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' resonate all over SYLVIA. If you're a writer, read this book and then study it. Then go out and read the rest of Michaels' work. It's not a lot of volume, but it's a lot of quality.

Nevertheless, the writing is strong and well-crafted, and the story is very powerful and moving. I found much painful truth in this short book, and it reminded me of some events in my own life, although I'm thankful that I've never experienced anything this extreme. However, I feel that many readers will be able to relate to these scenes of inexplicable conflict between couples, even if their experiences will probably be milder than what the author describes in this fictionalized memoir. Sylvia makes an interesting companion piece to another book that takes place in the early 60s, Revolutionary Road, although Sylvia was more minimalistic, flinty, and poetic, and its characters made the couple in Revolutionary Road look very very bourgeois.

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.

Though billed as a novel, "Sylvia" has the power and the rawness of memoir, and indeed is based on the author's own experience. It's clear that his wife Sylvia Bloch's suicide haunted Michaels throughout his writing life. His early story, "Manikin," links a Jewish undergraduate's suicide to her rape by a Turkish student - and to her fiancé's chilling response. At the end of that story the only expression of sorrow is the Turk's cursing and wailing.

"Sylvia" was his second attempt to deal with this deeply personal trauma, and had he lived longer it might have gone through another revision. It is told plainly -- no pyrotechnics, few literary allusions, no dead elder relatives. But despite the years that passed between Bloch's death and Michaels's working and reworking of the material, the narrator still doesn't fully grasp his own role in his troubled young wife's despair, seemingly unable to understand how things he did or didn't do might have affected her.

Michaels is best known for his flashy novella or short novel called "The Men's Club," which was made into a bad movie. But like Chekhov, Michaels deserves to be read mainly for his short 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 chronicle the sexless life of a gifted Santa Monica mathematician who keeps house alone. Less pyrotechnic than the earlier work, they're more smoothly written and stark in form, and they consider moral problems freshly. Michaels was writing more Nachman stories when he died. Had he lived they might have made a novel. As it is, they're seven irregular beauties, to be read again and again.

Yet if the reader can face the difficult material, "Sylvia," too, is well worth reading. Not as realized as Peter Handke's great memoir about his mother's suicide, "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams," Michaels' non-fiction novel nonetheless resonates with the grim misery -- childlike, plaintive and endlessly circular -- of incomprehensible loss.

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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."

I read "The Men's Club" many years ago and liked it. It was about a group of clueless men who got together and talked about women while they trashed a house with knives. The problem with "Sylvia" a novel/memoir (not sure which) is that Michaels himself talks and writes like the arrogant fools that were characters in "The Men's Club."

The narrator, Michaels, writes how he hated Sylvia, screamed at her, cheated on her, never should've married her, and then she suicides. She might have lived but the ambulance took her to a hospital full of non-white doctors who barely knew what they were doing.

This tale is coupled with little, timely anecdotes about NYC in the 1960s: they go to the Village Vanguard, they see Lenny Bruce, Michaels meets Allen Ginsburg for the third time and Ginsburg doesn't remember him (or maybe pretends not to recognize him). Michaels mentions current events from the time period and then mentions how he never got Sylvia to take any interest in the news paper. Sylvia is presented as kind of dumb and emotional as are the narrator's parents.

I don't know how much of this book is really true but if this is actually a portrait of the writer's ex-wife, orphaned, suicided and leaving no children, it's a miserable way to present her, even if he hated her.

The short book is well-written but the tight style can't save such an arrogant self portrait.