Short Takes
Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z.
By Debra Weinstein
Random House, 242 pp., $23.95
Annabelle Goldsmith of Huntington Station, L.I., is young and innocent when she agrees to become the assistant to the Flower Poet Z. As an ambitious and talented college junior, she eagerly accepts the position, which includes the usual skills (research and writing), the demeaning tasks (picking up the cleaning and washing dishes), and the zany requests (guarding the poet's "psychic space" and devoting her life and loyalty to the poet's literary career). She must be selfless and invisible; in fact, she must become "wallpaper."
Annabelle seems never to catch on, as Z.'s romantic life becomes tangled, her husband seems strange, her daughter's acts unhinged. Rumors and rivalries swirl around the academic department where Z. holds the power to create and demolish careers, tenure-track jobs, and reputations. Even as Annabelle's jobs escalate to creating a course curriculum, arranging and editing interviews, and running interference, she refuses to disappoint or doubt her poet-mistress. Eventually, she recognizes that her idol may have flaws, but she is unnaturally slow to dope out all the crimes committed by Z. and her demented family.
Annabelle is the perfect naif, the babe in the academic woods who only slowly and painfully discovers that her mentor is her tormentor. And in a final ironic twist to this splendid satire of the literary life, she emerges as the future leader of the pack in a long line of literary lionesses.
Uncle Rudolf
By Paul Bailey
St. Martin's, 184 pp., $21.95
As a child of 7, Andrei Petrescu is sent from Romania to London for a short holiday with his wealthy, worldly, famous uncle. The year is 1937, and the brief vacation becomes a permanent exile. Only later does the child learn of his pregnant mother's brutal rape and murder, and his father's desperate suicide.
He remains in London and, as Andrew Peterson, thrives under the loving care and fierce protection of his uncle Rudolf. Rudolf educates the boy's ear, palate, intellect, and heart. But he can never know the child's general feelings of wonderment and confusion, his wordless despair at being abandoned by his parents, his shameful lust for his dashing uncle.
Rudolf in his prime was a swashbuckling leading man of light operetta. But he was also a gifted singer of serious opera. Filled with regret for opportunities lost and time wasted, he took comfort in knowing that the trash he sang, which was popular with the very people who destroyed Europe, was composed primarily by Jews. His nephew comes to appreciate this irony, as he comes to appreciate the many small and large generosities, failures, and eccentricities of his uncle. While he loses his parents, his country, and his language, he gains his uncle. And it turns out, in this moving, memoir-like novel, this is compensation enough.
Vanishing Point
By David Markson
Shoemaker & Hoard, 191 pp.,
paperback, $15
While "Vanishing Point" is subtitled a novel, it is actually a compendium of literary gossip. Brief snippets of information chronicle the creative lives -- and deaths -- of various artists. Eventually, the author's obsessions emerge as clearly as if he had written a conventional novel: death, poverty, and critical error.
The most often-cited facts are the places of death of artists from Poe to Goya to Buster Keaton to Alice B. Toklas. On poverty: "John Cleland wrote 'Fanny Hill' to keep himself out of debtor's prison." Samuel Johnson wrote "Rasselas" to pay for his mother's funeral. Georges Seurat died at 31, having sold only two paintings. On critical error: Ezra Pound found Milton "disgusting, coarse-minded, asinine." Tolstoy to Chekhov: "You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are worse." Byron on Wordsworth: "Drivel." Nabokov thought "Don Quixote" overrated.
A sprinkling of wonderful and weird facts keeps the volume a constant surprise: Christina Rossetti had a pet wombat. Simone de Beauvoir was an inch taller than Jean-Paul Sartre. "For some years, Marcel Duchamp was the second-ranked chess master in France."
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York. 