With a
title like Life on Sandpaper, you know the book is meant to be rough. And so it
is—the Israeli painter/writer Yoram Kaniuk's bumpy, bristly account of his
multiyear spree in Greenwich Village after being wounded in the 1948 War of
Independence. Nothing is polished—not the descriptions, not the dialogue, not
the action. It's life left in a natural state with all its scraggy joy intact.
What a life it is. These
were the glory years of New York's bohemian scene: abstract expressionism,
improvisational jazz, beat poetry sung on the streets in a bawdy, feverish mix.
It was the era when sentimental gangsters wept at the music in nightclubs, when
if you had the kind of moxie Mr. Kaniuk apparently had, you could score a dance
with Ginger Rogers by pretending to be a Soviet spy. A parade of drugged-out
angels and talented grotesques lurch through in a glorious, messy,
Fellini-esque sprawl.
Wise was the editor who
didn't try to impose gloss on the book's spontaneous, splintery disorder. Roughness
can be a virtue when describing larger-than-life characters like Frank Sinatra
down on his luck and "singing like cowboys fight in the movies" to
get himself back in the game; James Dean with his "mischievous sense of
shame"; the shrewd and bitter menace of William Saroyan. Gag writers for
the Steve Allen show, the funniest show on TV at the time, turn out to be "five
of the saddest people I'd ever met, their faces long and longer," sitting
around a bottle of Four Roses bourbon laughing with their mouths closed.
Pungent cameos abound: Jerome Robbins, James Agee, Leonard Bernstein, Billie
Holiday, Peter Ustinov, Charlie Parker, Willem de Kooning, on and on.
Not
many women's names in the list above? Fear not. Women abound in Kaniuk's
account; in point of fact, just about every heterosexual encounter ends up in
the sack. OK, one with a nun doesn't. And Lady Day wasn't crazy about his
kissing. But Kaniuk finds succor of a sort by picking up widows in cemeteries,
female drivers stuck in the mud and, oops, the nun is back 50 pages later, hot
to trot.
Are we
meant to believe every word? It hardly matters. Kaniuk calls his book an "autobiographical
novel," and it feels curmudgeonly to quibble. In truth, the
self-mythologizing gets a bit much sometimes: "I learned where to get
cheap meatball-and-spaghetti meals in various, almost secret locations."
Really, secret spaghetti joints? But he redeems himself with self-awareness of
the most astringent kind. "My talent was meager," he says of his own
painting, "I was only doing my best, but my best was shallow and
conceited."
So what are we to do with
this much unvarnished self-involvement? Surrender to it! If not every word is
true, the one thing we can believe in is its energy: the sheer, driven thrust
of it. And we should feel free to read it any which way we want. Since Kaniuk
doesn't follow any rules, we don't have to, either. 417 pages contain no
quotation marks, no chapter breaks, not even a fleck of white space to provide
a breather. With that kind of anarchy, we can be anarchic ourselves, and pick
it up or put it down anywhere. We can play as rough as he does!
Daniel
Asa Rose is the author, most recently, of Larry's
Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China With My Black-Sheep
Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant ...
and Save His Life, named one of the top
books of the year by Publishers Weekly.
Subscribe
Email
Print
Share
Please sign in to add a comment on this article.