Review: ‘The Essays of Leonard Michaels’

Time Out New York, 2009

Leonard Michaels was one of the last century’s undiscovered populists and truly great pervs. Starting with 1969’s story collection Going Places, he wrote about sex and relationships with more spikiness and shading than just about anyone. But while Roth, Updike and Mailer titillated the masses, Michaels flew under the radar—so low that by the time he died in 2003, most of his works were out of print.

This is criminal but slowly changing, thanks to last year’s publication of his Collected Stories and now these essays, which range from intellectual exercises published in Granta and The New York Times Magazine to personal notebooks. They tread familiar memoir territory—family, coming of age, the parsing of romantic clichés—but crackle with observational power. Michaels was a master of the economical sentence, and for phrasing fetishists, there is plenty to revel in here. (A line comparing movie-watching to predation is alone worth the price of admission.)

Unsurprisingly, several pieces fixate on sex and romance, a rake’s non-progress. They reveal a man frustrated by romance but deeply wise about its cultural implications. (Perhaps only Michaels could, in an essay titled “On Love,” reference the ass-buttering scene in Last Tango in Paris.) There are bracing ideas everywhere: brilliant dissections of the word relationship and film-noir power dynamics.

But the collection is strongest in Michaels’s reminiscences about family, friends and his childhood on the Lower East Side, speaking Yiddish. The milder, meditative Michaels that emerges here is both surprising and not so much: Even his most lurid stories hum with emotional intelligence, a hunger for human connection and a deep awareness that there’s no such thing. One piece here recalls his father’s funeral, where a rabbi chastises him for not displaying his grief. But the sadness is there. “He feels,” his mother snaps at the rabbi. “He feels plenty.”