Leonard Michaels’s first collection of stories, Going Places (1969), was nominated for the National Book Award in 1969, and his second, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975), received a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Award in 1975. The “new” stories in A Girl with a Monkey, his third collection, include “Viva La Tropicana,” which appeared in Best American Short Stories, 1991, and the title story, which was chosen for that yearly anthology in 1997. With the exception of these two pieces, plus “Tell Me Everything” and two versions of the same story—“Honeymoon” and “Second Honeymoon”—the remaining stories here have been selected from his first two volumes—five from Going Places and six from I Would Have Saved Them If I Could.
Among the selected stories are Michaels’s two most famous anthology pieces—“Murderers” and “City Boy”—and such highly praised stories as “The Deal,” “Manikin,” and “Going Places.” “The Deal” depicts an encounter between a young woman and a group of fourteen- to fifteen-year-old boys over the woman’s dropped glove. The balance of power in this seemingly modest struggle shifts when the woman intimidates the boys by seductively asking them what they want for the glove. Female fear of male violence changes to adolescent fear of female sexual power as one of the boys is chided by the woman for being a chicken when he is not sure he wants a kiss for the return of the glove. The story shifts again when the rest of the boys crowd into the doorway also demanding a kiss, pushing and shoving and knocking the woman down; it ends when one of the leaders of the gang reverts to a combination of childlike plea and male threat.
With its combination of boyish Peeping-Tom comedy and horrifying sexually stimulated violence, “Murderers” is Michaels’s most anthologized story. The preteen narrator, Phillip Liebowitz, featured in a number of Michaels’s stories, climbs up the roof of a building with several friends to watch a bearded young rabbi and his sacramentally bald wife make love in their apartment across the way. As the boys become excited, one falls off the roof to his death, leaving only his ring finger caught on the gutter, and the rabbi calls out the window, “Murderers.” The story ends abruptly with the boys being sent to a New Jersey camp overseen by World War II veterans. The story has a strange lyrical quality as the narrator, a grown man recollecting the event, places it within the context of coming of age, saying that when it occurred, he wanted “proximity to darkness, strangeness.” At the end of the story, the narrator lies in his bunkhouse listening to owls, considering the mystery of the lessons he has learned about desire, danger, and death.
Second only to “Murderers” as an anthology favorite, “City Boy” also features Phillip Liebowitz, this time as a young man having sex with his girlfriend on the living room floor while the girl’s parents sleep in the adjoining bedroom thirty feet away. Liebowitz’s encounter with the girl’s father is broadly comic; he stands “spread-legged, bolt naked, great with eyes” face to face with the father, a sudden secret sharer like two men “accidentally [meeting] in hell,” before running out of the room “naked as a wolf.” The comedy increases as Phillip realizes that he needs poise to walk down the street naked. “I [am] a city boy,” he thinks. “No innocent . . . from Jersey. . . . My name [is] Phillip, my style New York City.” Later, after the girlfriend brings his clothes and tells him that her father has had a heart attack, he goes back to her apartment, thinking, “This was life. Death!” When she gets a phone call that her father is going to be all right and that her mother is going to stay all night with him in the hospital, Phillip and she “sank into the rug as if it were quicksand.” This is another coming-of-age lesson for Phillip Liebowitz, who encounters in typically comic fashion basic elements of desire and danger. Being cast onto the city streets stark naked in the middle of the night is the ultimate comic image of vulnerability, punishment for transgressions, and the unaccommodated self.
A number of critics consider Michaels’s “Going Places” one of his best. The story focuses on the aftermath of a savage attack on a New York cab driver named Beckman in which death is made close and tangible to him. Even as he begs his attackers to take his money, they beat him as if he were a “dumb, insentient bag,” mocking his cries for mercy. After this meaningless and mindless attack, which has encouraged Beckman to end his aimless drifting and to take control of his life, he starts a new job as a painter in a new factory building. In the climactic scene, he attempts to deliver a can of paint to a workman high above the factory floor. He slips, desperately clutching a pipe. The story thus ends with another close encounter with death; however, this time Beckman does not feel like the helpless victim. As the other painters urge him not to let go, the trembling in his muscles ceases and his hands become as rigid as the steel pipe he clings to. It is a victory that signifies determination and control, marking a shift in Beckman’s life.
“Manikin,” like “Going Places,” is another highly compressed and highly admired Michaels story. The focus here is on a young university student who goes out with a fellow student, identified in the story as a Turk, who rapes her in his car. However, this is not a message story about the social phenomenon known as “date rape,” but rather about how such acts result from responding to women as if they were inanimate dolls or dummies—a theme emphasized when, on the drive back to her dorm, the protagonist identifies with an armless, naked manikin in a store window. She does not tell the college authorities or her rabbi about the rape, but when she tells her fiancé, he feels “the ceremony of innocence [is] drowned” and leaves her. The ironic and underplayed tone of the story continues when afterwards another student comes to her room to find her hanging by her neck, her pelvis twitching, her feet dangling like bell clappers. The story ends with the Turk reading of the suicide and insisting that the girl loved him, getting drunk, and ending up in a field “cursing the source of things” until her hallucinatory ghost drifts up from the dew, and they roll together in the grass with him screaming because “however much of himself he lavished on her, she was dead.”
Michaels is better at these tight, highly compressed stories than he is when he allows himself to ramble, a truth that Michaels himself suggests in his brief introduction to the collection. He notes that although most of the stories in the book were written during times of political and cultural change in the early 1960s through the 1990s, he was more concerned with the shape and rhythm of sentences. Michaels says he was always more interested in form than anything else, even though he sometimes wondered if that interest was not somehow self-indulgent or bourgeois. Michaels’s two versions of the same story, “Honeymoon” and “Second Honeymoon,” nicely illustrate that this tension in his fiction between form and social reality is basically a generic issue. The first version of this story about two young men who work in the summer at a honeymoon resort in the Catskill Mountains is a bit under twenty pages, while the second version is twice as long. The material with which Michaels fills the additional twenty pages in the second version is illustrative of the difference between novelistic discursiveness and short-story compression.
“Honeymoon” is a formally controlled short story, while “Second Honeymoon” expands toward the novelistic. The central event of the story is made clear in the very first sentence of both versions when the narrator, an eighteen-year-old busboy, says that one summer at a honeymoon resort he saw a young woman, Sheila, who had been married a few hours earlier, fall in love with her waiter. The waiter is Larry Starker, the narrator’s roommate, who has modeled for the cover of cheap paperback romances as a Teutonic barbarian about to molest a seminude woman. “Honeymoon” is about the power of imaginative fascination and how it can overwhelm everyday reality. Throughout the story the narrator is fascinated with his roommate as being the embodiment of irrational obsession. At the conclusion, three years after the young woman has left her husband for Larry, the two return to the resort; although they have become an ordinary middle-class couple, when they dance together, the narrator feels gooseflesh on his arms as he watches them sliding along the floor “perfectly together.” Simultaneously, because he knows the woman’s first husband had mob connections, he sees Starker chained to blocks at the bottom of the lake, a bullet hole in his forehead.
In “Second Honeymoon,” the basic plot line remains the same. However, Michaels has added material about the narrator’s Communist upbringing, his mother’s affairs and suicide, his father’s death, and his life with his uncle Sol, as well as more detail about the “real” Larry Starker and Sheila’s wealthy capitalist father and her husband’s mob connections. All this dulls the impact of the fascination of the romantic, which is the thematic core of the first version. The novelistic tendency may thrive on the multiplicity of character, but the short story exists by tight compression focused on theme.
The title story, originally published in 1996 and selected for Best American Short Stories, 1997 is ample evidence that Michaels still succeeds best when he focuses on tight compressed form rather than indulging himself in reminiscence and novelistic discursiveness. The story is completely encapsulated in the opening sentence, which simply and provocatively states that the main character, Beard, while traveling in Germany the year following his divorce, falls in love with a young prostitute. Beard, becoming desperate when the girl begins to drift away from the obsessive core of their brief relationship, buys her a pair of expensive earrings as a “manifestation of his heart.” However, before he can give them to her, she disappears. After Beard boards a train to leave, he discovers the earrings are missing. When he slides the door of his train compartment open, the young woman is miraculously standing there. In spite of the magic of the appearance, it is a realistic moment when Beard sees her for what she is, merely a pale, slender girl who does not think she is pretty. Facing this “plain reality,” he forgets the earrings and gently pulls her to the floor, whispering “I love you,” realizing she needs him as much as he needs her. He shuts his eyes in a trance of pleasure as the train “pressed steadily into a mute and darkening countryside.”
Influenced by Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel, Francisco L. Borges, and Franz Kafka, Michaels combines fantasy and realism to create terrifying comic worlds. His whimsical style, erotic satire, and comic treatment of sexual violence evoke the hideous that is simultaneously the hilarious. Although many critics have noted the harsh violence in Michaels’s stories about the anonymous viciousness of the modern city, what gives his best stories their power is his fascination with fascination and his obsession with romantic obsession.