Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers (review)

Abstract

118 BOOK REVIEWS SHOFAR Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers, by Stanley Elkin. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1990. 290 pp. $12.95. The stories in this collection were first published separately in the 19605 and appeared together in one volume for the first time in a hardback edition published by Random House in 1966. Since then the collection has been reprinted by various publishers. The present reprinted edition adds a new Preface by the author and a new Afterword by Harold Brodkey. Elkin has published a dozen or so novels since 1965, and his critical reputation continues to rise among readers of serious American fiction. Long considered to be a writer's writer, he is now well-known enough to general readers to have been the subject of an appreciative article in the New York Times Magazine (March 3, 1991). He has also become a topic of scholarly studies. , The tone of the entire collection is set in the title story. Its protagonist, Jake Greenspahn, the owner of a small supermarket, is grieving over the recent death of his twenty-three-year-old son, Harold, whom he had idealized. In the course of a single workday, Jake vents his grief by picking quarrels with customers, employees, other merchants, apparently because they continue to live while Harold is dead. Wherever he looks, he finds people b~moaning their lives in whining self-pity, or smugly dispensing fatuous advice to the suffererS. In short, the human world divides into "the criers, ignorant of hope, and the kibitzers, ignorant of despair. Each with his pitiful piece broken from the whole of life, confidently extending only half of what there was to give" (p. 35). In the climax of the plot, Jake has badgered an employee he accuses of stealing to the point of revealing that he once saw Harold take five dollars from the till. The story ends with Jake dreaming of going to synagogue to mourn for his son, whom he finally realizes was as arrogantly incomplete as all of the other "podlers" in the world. Like Jake, most of the protagonists are Jews, their speech seasoned by idioms and rhythms ultimately derived from Yiddish. But Elkin is not particularly interested in what it means to be a Jew in America, nor is his work informed by Judaic thought or lore. His protagonists enact a universal drama in which life strips them bare of any illusions or sentiments from which they might draw strength or which might help them to find value in their existence. His stories are the converse of Bernard Malamud's, whose characters often grow into menschen under the pressure of failure, anguish, and disillusionment. By contrast, failure, anguish, and disillusionment are not Volume 10, No.2 Winter 1992 119 redemptive for Elkin's heroes but lead instead to blindingly clear and liberating insights about the futility of attempting to find lasting success, happiness, and understanding. Writing from the point of view of these characters-a man just fired who burns every bridge he can find, a homeless musician who repays kindness with spite and malice, a man who too actively seeks the wisdom he believes is revealed only to the dying, Elkin makes them peer into the void, and, like the speaker in one of Frost's poems, match that unresponding emptiness with their own inner "desert places." For toughminded readers, there is an equally tough-minded courage in these taut and muscular stories. Michael Shapiro Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana The Great Letter E, by Sandra Schor. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. 204 pp. $18.95. This novel has been dubbed a cross between the denseness of Cynthia Ozick and the comedy of Saul Bellow. There's a great deal of truth in this categorization even though one should not ignore the denseness of Bellow and the comdy of Ozick also. Of course, another common denominator is the amorphous designation ofJewish-American fiction for all three writers. As with Dickens, Schor interweaves a gallery of comic characters. Schor's little gallery is not as ample and varied as the ones provided by Dickens , but 'twill do. She has as central character Barry Glassman...