Volume 13, Number 1 · July 10, 1969
Couples
By Denis Donoghue
Going Places
by Leonard Michaels
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 192 pp., $4.95
Mirrors
by Lucy Warner
Knopf, 181 pp., $4.95
What I'm Going to Do, I Think
by L. Woiwode
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 309 pp., $5.95
A Nest of Ninnies
by John Ashbery, by James Schuyler
Dutton, 191 pp., $4.95
Leonard Michaels is a gut-writer. The paradigm of his fiction is simple: two people, locked in violence. The stories are set in 'the city's dark going places,' New York for instance, but the setting is not crucial, any city will answer. The people themselves hardly matter, except as conductors of violence; they are good for intensity and shock, nothing else. We are not required to care for them, but rather to be afflicted by the venom they secrete. The characters come in pairs, couples, Phillip and Veronica, Sarah Nilsin and Myron Bronsky, Melanie and Harry, Phillip and Cecily, Miller and Mildred. Their violence is the kind that couples engender: birth and copulation and then death. Sometimes the hero has a twin, as Phillip has his secret sharer, Henry; and then the girl, the stuttering Marjorie, provides the occasion, the incitement. Of Henry, Phillip says:
Review, 2777 words
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