Volume 22, Number 18 · November 13, 1975
Vectors
By Irving Howe
I Would Have Saved Them If I Could
by Leonard Michaels
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 188 pp., $7.95
A little culture can be a dangerous thing; more of it, still more so. Reading this collection of stories prompts one to wish that Leonard Michaels had never heard of alienation, sentiment of being, nihilism; his fragile talent might then have flourished in comparative innocence. As it is, these stories are crusted with the junk of fashionable culture, both the fashionable culture of today and the fashionable culture of yesterday. There is Bellovian swagger without Bellow's rich complication; Rothian sexual assertiveness without Roth's sense of fun; and there is Mailer, and Malamud, and Borges, and Counter-Culture, all rendered 'heavy' in the sense that young people use that term. Behind the influences, references, knowingness, and bravado, one glimpses a rather sweet sensibility with a small, damaged gift for narrative and notation.
Review, 683 words
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