The Great Letter E (review)

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, a New York optometrist undergoing a mid-life crisis. His separation from his wife, Marilyn , occurs at the time of his son Michael's Bar Mitzvah. Glassman moves from his comfortable home and family to a cramped hovel in Brooklyn. Here we have hilarious black comic, pathetic, and tragic episodes-one breathlessly following the other. They involve Glassman, Marilyn, son Michael; Enid-Glassman's cousin and sometime lover; Marilyn 's lover; the Brooklyn landlady, the ubiquitous Rabbi Myberg; Frannie -Glassman's outspoken sister; "Stormin Norman"; Glassman's Hispanic assistant; Spinoza; and others. The "E" of the story, "the great letter E," is in its most perfunctory form, a letter on Glassman's eye-chart. But as the story progesses the E stands for much more-Eye, Elohim, Ethics, Eros, Etc. The story, from Glassman's point ofview, starts this way: "So help me, I am an hour late. The episode is over, yet my mind keeps altering its strategies , as if the rabbi were still before me, frowning, gesturing, cautioning. I 120 . SHOFAR lean my head against the couch and surprise myself: in the fever of reimagining my case, I doze off on the couch." Or later on we have-"God is neither underachiever nor overachiever. He is maker and made, dreamer and dreamed." Or-"My poor blind sperm shouting to her [Marilyn's] deaf little eggs over and over, in the very word Moses used as God appeared before him on the mount: Hineni! Over here!" Or-"Michael and Deirdre are missing: Bonnie and Clyde packing a copy of the Old Testament. Two outlaws gone religious." Or the endless lists by Barry- -For the letter E -For the "anythings" worth losing Marilyn for -For the men and women influenced by Spinoza -For how weak, misused, destabilized I am -For why I married Marilyn -For what I think when I make love One .can ask: What really does the philosopher Spinoza have to do with this contemporary Jewish-American novel? The answer: a great deal that is significant and enigmatic. Just as it has to do with a number of other modern Jewish-American novels. Spinoza fascination by Bernard Malamud, I. B. Singer, and many other modern Jewish writers has never abated. Scan the subtexts of The Fixer and The Family Moskat for starters. It's been said that Sandra Schor in this novel "walks out upon the literary landscape as a brilliant new stylist, working in a vein as emotionally complex as it is comically bold and erotically charged." An excellent capsule comment for The Great Letter E. Leslie Field Department of English Purdue University Studies in American Jewish Literature. "The Odyssey of a Writer: Rethinking Philip Roth," edited by D. Walden. Vol...