In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

American Jewish Fiction 84pDisturbances in the Field By Lynne Sharon Schwartz HARPER AND ROW, 1983. 368 PAGES. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s fiction might be described as psychological realism: without high modernist stream of consciousness or the stylization of typical realism, Schwartz presents a protagonist whose relationships, emotions, likes and dislikes, and patterns of thought and behavior are extraordinarily subtle and textured. The title of her third novel, Disturbances in the Field, is psychiatric jargon—the idea, drawing on physics, being that the source of many people’s psychological problems is that “something intrudes between the expressed need on the one hand and the response of the other”—but Schwartz herself, and her protagonist, Lydia, have no investment in dogma, psychoanalytic or otherwise. The novel describes Lydia’s busy life on the Upper West Side of New York: she maintains close friendships with a group of women she knew in college at Barnard, who bonded over an introduction to philosophy course, and she is married to a painter, Victor, with whom she has four children. The size and number of her social groups suit her well: as a professional musician and music teacher, she prefers to play in ensembles, enjoying trios and quintets in which “nothing individual is accomplished without the deferential support of the rest”—a statement that could also describe many families, happy and otherwise. With extraordinary precision and empathy, and in a narrative that gracefully swings between the past and the present, Schwartz describes the personalities of each of Lydia’s friends, lovers, and kids, down to the songs they sing and their thoughts about the ancient philosophers. When tragedy strikes Lydia’s family, and she begins, understandably enough, to falter, the responses of each of her loved ones reflect their personalities and positions relative to her, providing a vibrant sense of the fullness of Lydia’s experience. Lydia is a modern Jewish woman, unself-consciously; the family holds a Passover seder not out of obligation but because they want to. In an almost proto-Seinfeld dilemma that sharply evokes what life can be like on the Upper West Side, Lydia struggles over whether to buy fruit from the new Korean grocery or continue to patronize her current fruit man, a Holocaust survivor whose rudeness and paranoia bother her, but who addresses her, because she is Jewish, as one of his “landsleute” (that is, countrymen). Lydia’s thinking owes more to the Greek philosophers than to the Talmud, but even the psychological perspective she brings to her experiences could be said to be Jewish; it is not coincidental that the title phrase itself is taught to her by a psychiatrist who is the son and grandson of rabbis. A heartbreaking novel that captures the small world of one woman in good times and bad, Disturbances in the Field is at once both intellectually stimulating and emotionally riveting, a quiet tour de force of family, love, and loss. 118 Further reading: Schwartz did not begin to write until dropping out of graduate school in her early 30s and has since published many novels and short story collections: Leaving Brooklyn (1989) and Referred Pain (2004) touch on Jewish themes more directly than most of the others. In a memoir and essay, Ruined by Reading (1996), Schwartz describes how she learned to read at the precocious age of three; she also won a major prize for her translation, from the Italian, of Liana Millu’s Holocaust testimony Smoke Over Birkenau (1991). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85pHeartburn By Nora Ephron KNOPF, 1983. 224 PAGES. Not the world’s first novel to include recipes (the Brazilian author Jorge Amado, for one, did it in his novel of 1966, Dora Flor and Her Two Husbands), Nora Ephron’s Heartburn nonetheless predated the mainstreaming of the practice in bestsellers such as Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café (1987) and Like Water for Chocolate (1989), both of which followed in Ephron’s book’s footsteps, too, in being adapted into hit movies. The conjunction of food and narrative isn’t surprising, as gourmands and litterateurs have had much in common for centuries. What is more shocking about Ephron’s witty roman à clef is how bravely it tells the story of the author’s own divorce. The novel concerns one Rachel Samstat, who is seven months pregnant and already the mother of a two-year-old when she discovers that her husband has been sleeping with another woman. The louse, Mark, is a syndicated columnist for whom Rachel—a New...

Share