I will propose two axioms here, the first completely obvious, the second hopefully less so. One: most writers have a zone of thematic interest they compulsively revisit in their work.
Great writers have great subjects, and they return to them again and again, like a dog worrying daily over a buried bone. In his recent Lincoln in the Bardo , for example, George Saunders abandons his familiar dystopian terrain, going back in time to achieve something artistically new.
Following the runaway success of The Adventures of Augie March , with its rollicking first-person narration and ambition of scope, Bellow released Seize the Day , a slim novella, and cramped in every sense. But Seize the Day is a notable aberration, an effortful — though somewhat clumsy and abortive — stab at smallness and bathos. The Nachman Stories, as they are informally known, are a cycle of seven pieces bound by a single protagonist, Raphael Nachman, a well-regarded mathematician at UCLA Michaels himself taught at Berkeley for decades.
These stories are terrific, wonderfully written, shot through with an enigmatic, elusive sense of mystery. And they are completely different than anything else Michaels wrote. In it, a group of teenage friends routinely masturbate on the sloping edge of a Brooklyn apartment roof while watching a young rabbi and his wife have sex across the street. One day, a member of the group slides down the roof, tearing his finger off in the process, and plummeting five stories. The naked rabbi screams out the window at them, calling them murderers — a fusing of the carnal and mortal in one indelible moment.
The story proceeds as you might imagine: sex, sex, regret, folly, sex, regret, sex. I have no secrets. Sullivan, unless you want to make me frightened and self-conscious.
