Lelchuk, Alan 1938–

views updated

Lelchuk, Alan 1938–

PERSONAL: Born September 15, 1938, in Brooklyn, NY; son of Harry and Belle (Simon) Lelchuk. Education: Brooklyn College (now Brooklyn College of the City University of New York), B.A., 1960; Stanford University, M.A., 1963, Ph.D., 1965; University of London, graduate study, 1963–64.

ADDRESSES: Office—Jewish Studies Program, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755. Agent—Georges Borchardt, Inc., 136 E. 57th St., New York, NY 10022. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, editor, educator, and publisher. Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, assistant professor of English, 1966–77, writer-in-residence, 1978–81; Amherst College, writer-in-residence, 1982–84; Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Liberal Studies, 1985–; Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary, Otto Salgo Chair in American Studies, 1999–2000. Cofounder and senior editor, Steerforth Press, Canaan, VT, 1994–.

MEMBER: Authors Guild.

AWARDS, HONORS: Received Yaddo fellowships, 1968–69, 1971, 1973; MacDowell Colony fellowship, 1969; Guggenheim fellow, 1976–77; Mishkenot Sha'Ananim fellow, 1976–77; Fulbright writer-in-residence, Haifa University, 1986–87, Fulbright Scholar grant, 2003.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

American Mischief, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1973.

Miriam at Thirty-Four, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1974.

Shrinking: The Beginning of My Own End, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1978.

Miriam in Her Forties, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1985.

On Home Ground (young adult), illustrated by Merle Nacht, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1987.

Brooklyn Boy: A Novel, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1990.

Playing the Game: A Novel, Baskerville (Dallas, TX), 1995.

Ziff: A Life?, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 2003.

SCREENPLAYS

(With Jiri Weiss) Tippy, 1978.

(With Isaac Yeshurun) What Ashley Wants, 1987.

(With Bill Phillips) Degrees of Honor, 1993.

OTHER

(Contributor) A. Edelstein, editor, Images and Ideas in American Culture, Brandeis University Press (Waltham, MA), 1979.

(Editor, with Gershon Shaked) Eight Great Hebrew Short Novels, New American Library (New York, NY), 1983, reprinted, and author of introduction, Tobey Press (New Milford, CT), 2005.

(Contributor) Congregations: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1987.

(Contributor) Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal, Times Books (New York, NY), 1989.

(Contributor) Facing America: Multikulturelle literatur der heutigen U.S.A., Rotpunkteverlag (Zurich, Switzerland), 1994, translation by Regina Rosenthal published as Facing America: Multicultural Literature of Contemporary U.S.A.: A Reader, Wesleyan University Press, 1995.

Contributor to periodicals, including New American Review, Modern Occasions, Partisan Review, New York Review of Books, Dissent, Works in Progress, New Republic, New York Times Book Review, and Transatlantic Review.

Associate editor of Modern Occasions, 1970–72.

A collection of Lelchuk's papers can be found at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University.

SIDELIGHTS: Alan Lelchuk's first novel, American Mischief, achieved notoriety for its author even before its publication. The novel first received attention because Bantam Books reportedly paid more than 250,000 dollars for the paperback rights—a very high figure for a first book, especially in 1972. Then Lelchuk collided with Norman Mailer over a scene in the novel in which a character named Norman Mailer is murdered in an ignominious manner. At a meeting with Lelchuk and Farrar, Straus & Giroux representatives, Mailer complained that the scene was libelous and degrading to his character. At one point in the discussion, which grew heated, Mailer remarked: "Lelchuk, I don't want ever to meet you in an alley, because if I do, you're going to be nothing but a hank of hair and some fillings." For his part, Lelchuk argued that the importance of the scene had been blown out of proportion. "The scene is four pages out of 500 pages," he said, "and it obviously plays a small part in the whole texture of the book." Eventually, Lelchuk made some changes in the scene, but he insisted that the alterations were minor.

Notwithstanding highly favorable advance comments from Philip Roth, American Mischief received many unfavorable reviews. A Time critic, for example, declared: "American Mischief is another exploitive, topical novel. Lelchuk romps through the confusions and contradictions of today's beleaguered values … like a gratuitous looter in a cultural disaster area." Joseph Epstein, writing in the Washington Post Book World, believed that the novel is "as botched a piece of literature as has come along in some while…. Dialogue, plot and character are rudimentary. Everyone speaks exactly alike…. The plot itself, and especially the way the book ends, is slipshod and disappointing." In a New York Review of Books critique, Alfred Kazin found Lelchuk to be "a lively enough writer of narrative, entertaining above all in his provocativeness." Yet Kazin went on to say that the novel is "too intellectual" and expresses "no point of view that gets to the reader." Eliot Fremont-Smith, in Saturday Review, also had a mixed response to the work. He considered the book "good and bad, immensely repetitive and boring," and "clever, funny, and fashionable." Not every critic proved hostile, however. In the New York Times Book Review, Samuel Shem deemed American Mischief "a sprawling, energetic, sexual, and intellectual Jewish carnival."

Miriam at Thirty-Four, Lelchuk's second novel, also elicited some negative responses. In the New York Times Book Review, Sara Blackburn contended that Lelchuk's handling of female sexuality "leaves readers holding a bag of demonstration sex scenes and pretentious modern moralizing." In addition, Blackburn felt that the characters lack depth, and she concluded that "in presenting Miriam [the protagonist] and everyone in only one dimension—the sexual—Lelchuk has at once sensationalized and trivialized the culture and the character whose life he means to illuminate." On the other hand, William H. Pritchard noted in the Hudson Review that Miriam at Thirty-Four "is superb in its presentation of Greater Boston, particularly the 'accepted insanities' of Cambridge." But he suggested that this realistic presentation does not mesh well with the novel's "parables of self-destruction [or] self-fulfillment." A better reception awaited Lelchuk's sequel, Miriam in Her Forties, which Samuel Shem, in the New York Times Book Review characterized as "a dense, finegrained and trenchant slide show of modern life…. Mr. Lelchuk is a writer of intelligence, sexual sensibility and drive. Miriam is a full-bodied portrait of a woman who lives hard in our heads…. Yet she lives with spirit. I expect we'll hear from her again."

In Shrinking: The Beginning of My Own End, Saturday Review contributor Robert Stephen Spitz commented that it "is a confusing, often brilliant work that is too grandiose in scope to command the force or focus necessary to substantiate any one of its many subplots." Robert Towers, writing in the New York Times Book Review, reacted more strongly. He objected that the book seems to plead for favorable treatment from critics, that it lacks wit, that "the writing is often slapdash," and that the book is a mixture of disparate elements, including "diatribes against critics and against stylistic distinction …, half-baked lectures on Melville and Babel,… transcripts of creative-writing classes, and remembered episodes from [the protagonist's] Brooklyn childhood." In contrast to this, Anthony R. Cannella in Best Sellers admired Lelchuk's ambition, integrity, and intelligence in tackling the "meaty topics" of "the relationships of life and art, literature and criticism, illusion and reality, genius and madness, psychiatry and religion, fiction and autobiography." John Leonard of the New York Times discovered "fun and passion in Shrinking, as well as reasonably interesting counterpoint between the devices of art and psychiatry." Yet Leonard also cited the work for "hundreds of pages of tedium," observing: "Mr. Lelchuk careens from a comedy of literary manners to a seriousness so nervous and defensive that you want to give him a calming lollipop."

As any author might be, Lelchuk has been stunned and confused by the critical response to his work. "With their blend of blunt realism and frank language, erotic scenes and wayward intellectuals, provocative mix of class and race … [my novels] are not so easy to pigeonhole or categorize, or to use for tidy formulas about fiction," he wrote in an essay for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. "And my protagonists, bewildered intellectuals who try to steer between the Scylla of contemporary vulgarity and the Charybdis of ivory tower artificial purity are figures of contradictory desires. And since the prose generally is in the service of character and vision, and not the other way around, the novels tend to go against the grain of current terms of favor, like 'well-crafted novel' or 'stylish performance.'" Lelchuk admitted: "I've not tried very hard to conform to the prevailing fashions of our time, be it feminism or multiculturalism. On the contrary, playing the 'good boy' has never been my bag." The author expressed the opinion that some of his books "were simply misread and badly misrepresented."

One of the titles Lelchuk cited as "misread" is Brooklyn Boy, an imaginative part-fictional memoir of his own childhood in Brooklyn. New York Times Book Review correspondent Daniel Stern called the work "a poorly conceived confusion of realms," adding: "Buried any which way in this derivative, slapdash prose are the abortive beginnings of a Bildungsroman, the hints of an autobiography of a Jewish boy growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 60s, and a prolonged, exhaustive love song to Brooklyn, to baseball in general and the Brooklyn Dodgers in particular…. For all its high intentions, Brooklyn Boy does not read as successful serious fiction." Michiko Kakutani reacted more favorably to the book in her New York Times review. Brooklyn Boy, she wrote, "feels nostalgic, even elegiac, in tone. It's a paean to a lost time and world, an affectionate portrait of a sensitive young man, as yet unspoiled by ambition and disappointment…. There are moments when Brooklyn Boy succeeds in communicating to the reader a sense of what it must have been like to grow up in a particular neighborhood, in a particular family, at a particular time, and for that, it is worthwhile."

Lelchuk's 1995 sports novel, Playing the Game, a tale of an Ivy League basketball team that advances to the NCAA Final Four, was hailed in Publishers Weekly for presenting "several compelling versions of many moral dilemmas faced by coaches and players." Led by a coach who quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson to his inner-city players, the novel follows the unlikely team to its eventual upset triumph. Bill Ott, reviewing the novel in Booklist, noted that tales of underdogs tend to follow a predictable pattern, but Lelchuk "manages to work some tantalizing variations on it…. [The coach] wins us over just as convincingly as he converts his inner-city charges to the glories of the passing game and the wisdom of the Transcendentalists."

Ziff: A Life? is a "clever literary cat-and-mouse game," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. In the novel, Danny Levitan is a sixty-year-old novelist whose life and career have both entered their fading years. Levi-tan's career gets a much-needed boost when his editor suggests he write a biography of literary great Arthur Ziff, a writer whose literary star still shines, and who seems a likely candidate for a Nobel Prize in literature. Levitan agrees to the six-figure advance, but the project is complicated by the fact that he and Ziff have been friends, and off-again, on-again literary rivals, for years. Ziff is not enthusiastic, suggesting that Levitan turn the project into a novel that does not have to be based on any particular facts. Despite Ziff's misgivings, however, Levitan proceeds with the nonfiction project. He is offered a ready-made copy of the journal of Ziff's ex-wife, a noted French actress. He uncovers a number of scandalous sexual secrets from one of Ziff's former lovers in Europe. Finally, he visits places where Ziff lived and worked, attempting to get a tangible feel for the great novelist's work. In the process, Levitan discovers a Ziff that is remarkably different from the man who has been his friend for so many years. When the book is published, Ziff fires back at Levitan. Ziff viciously parodies Levitan in a short story and threatens a libel suit. In a climactic battle that could only occur in literary circles, the publication of Ziff's crowning masterpiece, a Holocaust novel, threatens to overshadow Levitan's biography.

Several reviewers commented on the parallels between the relationship between Levitan and Ziff and the real-life friendship between Lelchuk and literary giant Philip Roth, author of works such as Portnoy's Complaint and The Human Stain, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral. "Danny's desperation and sheer has-been-ness in the opening pages are the novel's finest moments," observed Claire Dederer in New York Times. "It's a little shocking to see Lelchuk so baldly gauge and send up his own stature." Still, "There's no shortage of courage in Lelchuk's portrayal of Danny," Dederer noted. "Lelchuk's sendup of literary catfights and author egos is often amusing," remarked the Publishers Weekly reviewer. A Kirkus Reviews critic called the book "smart and accurate, but definitely for a crowd already in the know."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 20, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994, pp. 237-255.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 5, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1976.

PERIODICALS

Best Sellers, September, 1978, Anthony R. Cannella, review of Shrinking: The Beginning of My Own End, p. 177.

Booklist, April 15, 1995, Bill Ott, review of Playing the Game, p. 1480; January 1, 2003, Frank Sennett, review of Ziff: A Life?, p. 848.

Chicago Sun-Times, March, 1974, review of American Mischief.

Hudson Review, spring, 1975, William H. Pritchard, review of Miriam at Thirty-Four, p. 149.

Jerusalem Report, June 30, 2003, Louis Gordon, review of Ziff, p. 42.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2003, review of Ziff, p. 167.

Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2003, Bernadette Murphy, "Plot Twists Occur Too Late to Save This Life;" review of Ziff, p. E12.

Ms., April, 1975, review of Miriam at Thirty-Four, p. 118.

New York Review of Books, February 8, 1973, Alfred Kazin, review of American Mischief, p. 21.

New York Times, May 8, 1978, John Leonard, review of Shrinking, p. C16; November 17, 1989, Michiko Kakutani, review of Brooklyn Boy, p. 40; April 20, 2003, Claire Dederer, "In the Shadow of the Big Boys," review of Ziff, section 7, p. 7.

New York Times Book Review, February 11, 1973, Samuel Shem, review of American Mischief, p. 2; November 17, 1974, Sara Blackburn, review of Miriam at Thirty-Four, p. 50; May 21, 1978, Robert Towers, review of Shrinking, p. 11; November 3, 1985, Samuel Shem, review of Miriam in Her Forties, p. 15; January 7, 1990, Daniel Stern, review of Brooklyn Boy, p. 24.

Publishers Weekly, March 20, 1995, review of Playing the Game, p. 45; February 17, 2003, review of Ziff, p. 58.

Saturday Review, February 17, 1973, Eliot Fremont-Smith, review of American Mischief, p. 75; June 24, 1978, Robert Stephen Spitz, review of Shrinking, p. 35.

Time, February 26, 1973, review of American Mischief, p. 94.

Washington Post Book World, February 11, 1973, Joseph Epstein, review of American Mischief, p. 3.