Amazing Grace

Review Domini continuedfrom previous page ---------------College , we're reminded). The line carries a whiff of satire, but not enough; it fails to snap off our guide's lifted pinkie. And he is a guide, often pausing for explanation, like most of the men and women here. The conflicts cause the gray-flannel dwarfto scream. "The French Lesson," the longest story, keeps us at such a clinical distance that its punches are telegraphed. Its closing detail—"The book slipped, unread, from her fingers onto the floor"—offers nothing new and so smacks of simple put-down: the clod has no aesthetics! At such moments, Excitable Women plays like a recital; it's scrupulous about the club rules and unfailingly polite. One story seems to encapsulate both what's distinguished and what's troubling about the collection —and readers should come away, I repeat, mostly impressed by the former. The stories won dazzling endorsements, from the likes of William Kennedy and Joanna Scott, and they appeared in excellent quarterlies. But consider "Samantha," a prizewinner for Ontario Review. The story develops a possible case of sexual harassment, gray-haired hippie prof on gold-toothed African American. Not for nothing does the title character bear the name of a witch; the girl can see trouble coming a long way ahead, and conjure it first to dance a little closer, then abruptly to disappear. So the professor's misbehavior amounts to no more than an elliptical conversation over coffee, in a public place—though he might yet tumble into worse. So, too, Samantha's flirting with danger nearly gets talked to death; again the climax holds no revelation . On the other hand, that climax entails an act all the more vicious for its quiet understatement, and the consequences may be explosive. What's more, Samantha's concluding movements are her most inchoate; they enact rather than analyze the painful duality of her position, as a bom intellectual with a bent for art films but also black skin, dreadlocks, and a gold front tooth. The girl's "tremendously sophisticated sentences ...," the professor tells her, don't seem to "fit" her agitated soul. In this the man anticipates the misgivings ofanother professor, in a later story, over the dark and earring'd Lennie. Insofar as Lennie and Lowell and Samantha and others knock their bookish nay-sayers into honestly consideringyea, into wholehearted and messy vitality, Boyers amounts to more than "tremendously sophisticated" himself. John Domini (www.johndomini.com) often reviews for ABR. His next book will be the novel Earthquake I.D. Amazing Grace Giles Harvey Seeing Jose Saramago Translated by Margaret JuIl Costa Harcourt http://www.harcourtbooks.com 317 pages; cloth, $25.00 Perhaps out oflaziness, critics compare the fiction of Jose Saramago to that of Kafka and Borges. He is, certainly, interested in the machinations of power and the apparent helplessness ofthe individual in the face of these machinations, and this interest often finds expression in stories of a parabolic or allegorical nature; but Saramago is more like himself than he is like any other author—always the sure sign of an authentic talent—and comparison is ofno value if it does not help us to better appreciate the differentness of things. The average review of one of his novels will consist of the critic praising the Nobel laureate's incredible knack for distilling vast, unwieldy themes into gripping narratives, while simultaneously bemoaning the many stylistic "quirks" with which the reader must contend in order to enjoy the story, as though Saramago were a charming dinner guest who sometimes speaks with his mouth full. Ofcourse, as MartinAmis says, style and content are not separable: "They come from the same place." An author's style is the expression of his deepest self. It is not his manner: it is all of him. It is where we should look, therefore, if we want to find out what makes Saramago different from other authors. At first glimpse Saramago's style does appear awkwardly atavistic. His sentences—those long, loose, baggy, rambling, digressive beasts—seem to have more in common with Rabelais or Cervantes than with any modem writer. Like most antiquated things they are very easy to parody...