Slices of working-class life from Wachtel (The Gates, 1994; Joe the Engineer, 1983), offered in a strange hodgepodge of...

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Slices of working-class life from Wachtel (The Gates, 1994; Joe the Engineer, 1983), offered in a strange hodgepodge of stories, vignettes, novellas, and fantasies. The author's world is a place in which the passive ennui and the unexamined languor characteristic of John Cheever's suburbanites have been nationalized and distributed among the masses. In ""Wednesday,"" two sisters gradually begin an argument over the loveless affair one of them carries on with her married boss, but decide to let it drop before their emotions manage to carry them anywhere. The two brothers in ""The Eye"" visit an old Brooklyn chum whose girlfriend has dumped him, but spend the time talking almost exclusively in a desultory fashion about painless subjects like herbal tea and the constellations. We are given the now-mandatory dose of magic realism in ""Sleeping Beauty"" (wherein an unhappy backwoods New Hampshire girl gets herself sawed in two at a lumberyard and sewn back together in the hospital) and in ""St. Ralphie"" (a description of how Ralphie became invisible when he was struck by lightning). ""One Week,"" which continues the adventures of the hero of the novel Joe the Engineer, is more detailed and realistic than most of the collection but has so little in the way of independent plot (other than a close depiction of Joe's daily routines) that it sounds more like a leftover chapter from the novel than an independent story. ""The Beginning of the End of the Cold War"" is the most ambitious piece here: a nicely detailed portrait of a disillusioned union organizer that nevertheless provides such a sparse plot it seems little more than a sketch for a larger work that never materialized. The second novella, ""A Joke""--a pompous variation on the old story of the travelling salesman and the farmer's daughter--is not very funny. Moments of interest, but not much more.

Pub Date: May 1, 1996

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996

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