Walter Abish, though he has published relatively late and little, projects a distinct presence in contemporary letters, in part because of the black triangular eye patch that distinguishes his photograph on book jackets. His three novels, three collections of short stories,...
[more]Walter Abish, though he has published relatively late and little, projects a distinct presence in contemporary letters, in part because of the black triangular eye patch that distinguishes his photograph on book jackets. His three novels, three collections of short stories, and lone book of poems have won a number of grants and awards (a MacArthur Foundation grant, the PEN / Faulkner Award of 1981) and high praise from such disparate spirits as Harold Bloom, Richard Howard, and Wendy Lesser. Born in Vienna in 1931, Abish, with his mother and father, fled Hitler’s Europe in 1940 for Shanghai, and in 1949 left what was shortly to become Mao’s China for Israel. He came to New York City in 1957, and by the early seventies had begun to publish English-language short stories in cutting-edge magazines like Confrontation, The Element, Extensions, and Statements: New Fiction. These stories partook of American absurdism, à la Donald Barthelme, Guy Davenport, Robert Coover: effects of cryptic collage, hostile whimsy, and learned fancy were presented in a clipped, deadpan style. The tone served, it seemed, to insulate the writer from taking the events described too seriously. Popular culture, so amusingly appropriated in post-abstract painting, flavored the writer’s vision; images filtered in from the glamorous, trendy realms of film, television, and photography. The papery worlds of news items, maps, and classic literature were shuffled together carefreely. For instance, in Abish’s first collection, “Minds Meet” (1975), the story “How the Comb Gives a Fresh Meaning to the Hair” conceives of Marcel Proust living in Albuquerque, where retarded children, cabbies, Pueblo Indians, and a young couple called Mr. and Mrs. Dip flit through short paragraphs bearing titles like “Fingernails” and “Marcel’s Childhood.” In Abish’s second collection, “In the Future Perfect” (1977), several stories (“Ardor / Awe / Atrocity” and “In So Many Words”) adorn narratives of a flat American sordidness with alphanumeric games, Teutonically rigorous in their ingenuity, that addle the reader’s brain like the insistent chimes of a canzone or a villanelle. What the New World means to Abish is restless sex wed to consumerist luxury—a quest for material perfection summed up in his aphorism “Above all America fears the limp prick.” - By John Updike
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