THE OLD LEFT: Stories

by Daniel Menaker ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 28, 1987

This second collection of short stories by New Yorker fiction editor Menaker (Friends and Relations, 1976) resembles Laurie Colwin's Another Marvelous Thing in design: eight linked pieces mounting to a single, quasi-dramatic end. Also like Colwin, Menaker peoples his tales with privileged and progressive Manhattanites, the types who, when they finally have children, make them the center of everything. Worst of all, and again like Colwin, Menaker's roughly chronological volume is riddled with factual repetitions, clear indications of the former lives of these stories as self-contained narratives. And in any case, his title is misleading--this is the Old Left only as embodied in the life of one man, the narrator's difficult Uncle Sol, an unpleasant ideologue who, well into his 80s, still lectures from The Daily World and considers insult the only mode of communications. But David Leonard, a professor of journalism at Columbia, is used to his uncle's antics. Although the first two stories concern David's earlier life--the tragic death of his brother from a routine knee operation and his own brief episode as an industrial spy--the remainder chart Sol's descent into sickness and his eventual death. Slightly senile and always impossible, Sol spends his ""lonely old age"" partly in the city and partly on his decaying farm in Connecticut--a farm he's willed to the Party for a Young Socialists camp. By the end of these nostalgic tales, and with the help of his shiksa wife, Elizabeth, David earns his rightful inheritance--not just the barn, but his uncle's ""rich, intangible legacy."" These lackluster fictions yield enough material for a story or two, but not enough to sustain even this slim volume.

Pub Date: April 28, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION