Richard Brickner, After She Left, Henry Holt
and
Company, 1988.
Emily Weil, daughter of a prosperous Park Avenue family, tries to
find her way in the adult world and face the challenges of raising
her own family
Readers who enjoyed the witty dialogue and rollercoaster of emotions
in Brickner's unforgettable novel Tickets will find a more subtle but
no less intelligently told story here. The eponymous "she"
is Emily Weil's mother, who left her stockbroker husband, two
daughters and a comfortable Park Avenue apartment to aid Jewish
refugees during WW IIand subsequently died in Shanghai. Although only
10 when her mother left, Emily's life has been haunted by her
absence. Images of her mother pervade her consciousness, sending an
ambivalent message of abandonment and selfless love. We meet Emily as
a teenager during the 1940s and follow her over the next decade as
she tests her ambition to be an actress during a stint in summer
stock, then joins a publishing firm after college. There are
boyfriends, one-time sexual encounters and, eventually, a short-lived
marriage. As Tickets revolved around opera at the Met, the central
image here is of the Broadway theater, the atmosphere of heightened
reality where Emily feels most alive. Her determination not to be
ordinary, not to waste her life, is her mother's legacy, she realizes
ultimately. Brickner has a remarkable ability to convey a young
woman's thoughts and impressions. His portrait of Emily, however,
while interesting, is overpowered and somehow trivialized by the
enigmatic presence of the mother she has lost. - Publishers Weekly
After She Left is a
psychological portrait of Emily, an intense young woman striving to
live her romantic ideals and avoid becoming a "typical
superficial Park Avenue girl." Part of her struggle is to live
up to a mother who deserted the family to help refugees and later
died during World War II. These events have left Emily with a
tremendous sense of loss. Despite constant immersion in Emily's
psyche, the reader comes away feeling curiously disengaged and
unsympathetic. Interesting reading, but the book is marred by abrupt
transitions and occasionally heavy-handed psychological
detail. - Cynthia Johnson Whealler
Brickner follows his opera-as-life-style Tickets (1981) with an
artful re-creation of 50's New York in the person of one haute
bourgeois, smart, screwed-up girl, Emily Weil, and her boundless
capacity to see her own life as a theatrical second act to a one-act
play. Daughter of a Park Avenue stockbroker and a mother who died in
Shanghai in the 30's (trying to help out Jewish refugees from
Hitler), Emily is glamour-infused, holding in her secret heart of
hearts the terrible wound but aching mystery of her mother's death as
well as a yearning for significance that's never really satisfied. No
Marjorie Morningstar, though, Emily seeks in men an objectified
changelessness, the kind of special zone only a Broadway play offered
her in adolescence. Not surprisingly, no man measures up--not a
genius young composer and pianist, not a college-friend librettist,
and finally, most wrenchingly, not husband Steve Farkas, heir to his
father's toy business who eventually throws it over to go to medical
school. At which point Emily throws him over--the change in Steve's
perception of himself being just too threatening. Though Brickner
writes a few fine scenes (most concentrated into what resemble
stage-dialogues)--Emily's disillusionment with an idiot actor in
summer stock; her funny, sympathetic first appointment with a mensch
of a psychiatrist--the central impression is of Emily's spoiled,
self-pitying need. All reaction, she's a born audience of one--with
promise in her soul never translated into action that's anything but
whiny. Brickner seems to want us to identify with her passive
self-destruction, too, her peevishness that people's lives are not as
goldenly fixed as magical nights on a Broadway aide. He's made her
(and the book), however, finally mostly a trial of our patience. -
Kirkus Reviews
Searching for
information on The Story of Harold, the cult classic by Terry Andrews
(a.k.a George Selden Thompson), I stumbled upon only a single review
from the time the book had been published - perhaps because few
reviewers in 1974 were willing to touch a novel in which a famous
children’s book writer also happens to be a suicidal, bisexual S&M
adventurer. Writing in the New York Times, Richard Brickner
generously commented that Andrews’ novel was “a work about almost
everything important that happens between people,” which was enough
to pique my curiosity about Brickner himself. Brickner had been a
beloved creative writing teacher and had written a few novels of his
own as well as a memoir of living as a paraplegic following a
terrible accident at age 20. After She Left (1988) is a beautifully
executed psychological novel, a subtle take on Henry James’ The
Portrait of a Lady transposed into 1970’s New York and to a young
woman wrestling with the her mother’s having abandoned husband and
child during the war only to perish in China helping Jewish refugees
in Shanghai. I can think of few novels I’ve read – including
James’ own – that enter so penetratingly into the tensions
between independence and relationship/marriage, or that so well
dissect the psychological scars that can govern the direction of a
life. This is a fine, overlooked American work ripe for re-issue (I’m
looking to you, NYRB). -
http://seraillon.blogspot.com/2019/12/best-of-2019-part-2-everything-else.html
+
+
+
Richard Brickner, Tickets, Simon &
Schuster,
1981.
The urban-affair novel seems to have replaced the suburban-marriage
novel as fiction's latest idea of a flexible social barometer--and
Brickner's new book is a good, if Limited, example of the genre. Alan
Hoffman is 40 and unmarried, a writer for a New York newsweekly, and
an addict of the most tony metropolitan entertainments: he attends
three or four opera performances a week during the season (as many
concerts, too), and his collection of ticket stubs, all saved, is
legendary. Importunate, impatient, voluptuously egotistical and
brusque, Alan has found in opera a stylization of what, in life, he
finds least bearable--the sheer time it takes for life and love to
conspire. Then, in the Met lobby one night, he meets a lawyer he once
interviewed, and the lawyer's wife: Betsy Ring--who turns out to be
Alan's complement, an Iphigenia in Limbo, bright and yet perfectly,
gracefully confused, swinging from on high during the period of doubt
marked by the upcoming publication of her first novel and the
postponed beginning of her second. Their affair starts as a stutter,
and Brickner sets down the physical shyness and hesitancy perfectly.
And then, suddenly--pure opera--the lawyer husband dies of a coronary
. . . which leaves the nervous lovers with even greater guilt and
even greater edginess, all expressed in increasingly brittle
dialogue: ""You were sounding so damn stingy. I decided to
have had enough. And I had to tell you something that made me feel
entitled to override you."" Brickner (Bringing Down the
House, My Second Twenty Years) has invested real sensitivity into
this etiolated tale, giving Alan, in particular, the swift to-and-fro
of feelings that most novelists consciously reserve for their main
female player But despite this (and the intelligence of the opera
metaphor throughout), the novel never rises above its characters'
well-educated neuroses, never becomes the full-fledged love story it
seems to aspire to--and when the affair is ended by sudden death, the
climactic liebestod is unaffecting and noticeably contrived. Clever,
sensitive, and talented work, then, yet limited by the very special
nature and tone of the classy-urban-affair genre. - Kirkus Reviews
+
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.