The Best And Worst Of Youth

Throughout the eight related and overlapping novellas that constitute “The Great Kisser” (Rager, 171 pages, $24.95), the protagonist, Michael Goldberg, is living in a state of perpetual disorder. The plot is triggered by the release to him of years of tapes of his sessions with his psychiatrist, Dr. Solomon Butinsky.Goldberg is a surrogate for his author, David Evanier, right down to a chapter that hilariously summons up the years Mr. Evanier spent at the Anti-Defamation League.Like Mr. Evanier, Michael Goldberg’s romp through the decades illuminates, in the background, a set of political shifts that begin in the outer layers of cultural and intellectual experience which originated among American communists.Goldberg mixes with party members, cowed by the rise of McCarthy, but also fraternizes with right-wing anti-communists. His first love is the daughter of a communist couple, the Bernsteins. To impress the father, Goldberg “carried around a red-leather bound volume of Stalin’s writings titled ‘Toward a Soviet America.'”Mr. Evanier has already charted brilliantly the degree of social dysfunction in the orbits of the communist left in New York in the 1940s in his book “Red Love.” “The Great Kisser” is no less successful.Goldberg is as obsessed with his parents as he is with his women. His father dominates, and controls Goldberg with a monthly subsidy to his writing costs whether he’s published or unpublished. “Why sweat it if you don’t have to,” his father tells him.The book’s lengthy account of the complex father-son relationship is astonishing. Michael is always on the lookout for an alternative father, and these other men form the majority of his profiles of Hollywood operators, communist ideologues, Holocaust survivors, and con artists — men from a world that, except in books such as “The Great Kisser,” have all but ceased to exist.Of his mother, Goldberg writes that just as his eventual literary successes would irritate his father, “My joy pissed her off to no end.” “I was the Jewish writer who hated his mother more than any other Jewish writer,” he writes. It was his mother who told him that he was “A Great Kisser,” a compliment he was searching for in other bedrooms.Following her death, Goldberg discovers just how much she actually focused on his progress, and the satisfaction it gave her. His farewell reminded me of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”: “Now the apartment was as silent to me as I had been to her in her last years, in her great, unstated need, in her panic, her fear of death, her aloneness.”“She loved me. What do you know.”Of the characters who make up his novel, Mr. Evanier writes,I loved them all and they loved me and they made me grasp life, even if I could not hold on to it. But I could never hold on to despair, because of them. All People of the Book who stepped out of history to hold me and embrace me and not let me fall. Why have I been so lucky in this life, this Jew who came after the Holocaust — the world had expended its Jew hatred for a while, having gotten it out of its system — and seen such bountiful goodness, so much beauty, totally unsuitable beauty to make literature out of because it is unbelievable — so incredible it would be pointless to try and write a story about it.“The Great Kisser” is Mr. Evanier’s triumph over the prison of his childhood and the various prisons that he entered down the line. The novel is a powerful evocation of a now nearly vanished world: postwar New York, a world that was a heady mix of businessmen, communists, radical politics, literature, family dysfunction, and stumbling sexuality.

The Best And Worst Of Youth

The Best And Worst Of Youth

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