Sylvia by Leonard Michaels

Here's a beautiful paragraph from Sylvia by Leonard Michaels:

Whatever my regrets about school—lost years, no Ph.D—I wasn't yet damaged by judgment. I hadn't failed badly at anything—like Francis Gary Powers, for example, whose name I heard every day. His U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Russia, and he'd failed to kill himself before being captured. Instead, he confessed to being a spy. President Eisenhower, who claimed the U-2 was a weather plane, looked like a liar.

What makes this graf work so well is Michaels's intense subtlety. President Eisenhower was, in fact, a liar, and Michaels even supplies his lie for anyone to see. Yet in the context of the story—Powers first "failing" by being shot down, then failing again by not killing himself, and finally failing by telling the truth—Eisenhower can only look like a wronged boss. Just by how he tells it, Michaels shifts the blame without anyone noticing: Eisenhower isn't wrong for not only sending a man over enemy territory but also expecting him to commit suicide; rather, via a bit of rhetoric Powers is made into a failure and a coward who ultimately makes Eisenhower look like a liar.

In this brilliant, complex paragraph, which occurs on page 5 of Sylvia, Michaels prepares readers for the amoral, topsy turvy world that his narrator will soon inhabit. The book concerns a disastrous marriage between two young bohemians in Greenwich Village, and, as with Ike and Powers, success and failure in this marriage's many, tortuous fights is meted out largely by measure of who can marshal the most power and best rhetoric to his or her side. As the narrator says in the paragraph's first sentence, the damage he receives in this four-year relationship is largely the damage of "judgment," just the kind that would doom Powers.

What I have really enjoyed about this short book is how virtually every paragraph stands up to the kind of close scrutiny that I've just subjected the above one to. Michael's deeply interpretable prose mirrors the world that it describes: Sylvia's world is one without any absolutes, one in which definitions are very fluid and have yet to be sorted out:

We carried away visions of despair and boredom, but also thrilling apprehensions of this moment, in this modern world, where emptiness could be exquisite, even a way of life, not only for Monica Vitti and Alain Delon but for us, too. Why not? Feelings were all that mattered, and they were available to us. We understood. We were susceptible to the ineffable strains and moods of modern life.

Such a free-form world is baffling; it is mirrored by Sylvia's mental illness, which causes her to fly into rage at the narrator and ultimately leaves him baffled as to what she wants or needs. Things can't remain formless forever. The story of the narrator's relationship is, largely, the story of judgment, or of the setting out of definitions to such a degree that they eventually become suffocating. For each fight between the narrator and his wife Sylvia, there's a little Ike and Powers moment, a horrible scene via which the victor will have set a tiny portion of the relationship in stone. This happens again and again until the relationship has become so stifled by years-old fights and patterns of behavior that there is really only one thing to do.

Comments

[scottbryanwilson]

This is a great book. I'm currently working my way through Michaels' collected stories--really, really good stuff. A lot of his stylistic fireworks come from the lack of overt fireworks--"intense subtlety" is totally apt.

[Josh]

This was a great post, and it made me feel like a bad reader.