tain ent
Cover Story
Ducovny said. A decade and many
drafts later, Coney represents the fer-
mentation of these thoughts.
Why did it take so long for him to
write his first novel?
"Fiction is truer than nonfiction,"
said Ducovny with a knowing. smile.
— Michael Aushenker,
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
DIARY OF AN
ADULTEROUS WOMAN
40>
A s,
6/22
2001
By Curt Leviant
(Syracuse University Press;
500 pp.; $29.95)
urt Leviant's latest novel,
Diary of an Adulterous
Woman, should be "X"-rated.
It should also be rated "A"
for artful, "B" for brilliant, "C" for
captivating, "D" for delicious — all
the way up to "Z" for zowie.
From the very beginning — from
before the contents page, in the book's
assorted epigraphs — the reader is
warned (and teased): Things are sel-
dom what they seem. At least three of
the five quotations are Leviant's own
invention; two are attributed to char-
acters in the book.
As Charlie Perlmutter, one of the
book's major players, puts it in his epi-
graph, "Truth can be invented. Fiction,
right? What better truth is there?"
Charlie and Guido Veneziano-
Tedesco — whose own_ epigraph is
"Give me libertine or give me death"
— re-encounter each other at a
reunion of their Brooklyn yeshiva class.
In Leviant's work, everything is a
clue. Every seemingly ad hoc detail has
been placed with an eye to develop-
ment, like those "magic rocks" one
had as a child that grew, under water,
to fantastic castles.
The story that is about to unfold is
all there, at the reunion that figures at
the beginning — Charlie's confused
feelings for Guido, his unsatisfying
emotional life, his career as a psychol-
ogist; Guido's physical beauty and self-
confidence, his passion for music, his
career as a photographer.
It's all there, if we can read it, if we
can sense the envy that will bring
them all down — including the beau-
tiful cellist Aviva, Guido's lover, whom
Charlie seeks out and finds, thereby
creating a triangle.
Diary is narrated with the antic,
manic wit that is Leviant's signature.
His wordplay will make you sit up and
take notice, will make you laugh till
you ache— if you appreciate humor
that is sometimes arcane, sometimes
too silly for words — despite the
attendant pain at the characters' dis-
tress, their agony, even.
- Readers who delight in postmodern
fiction will enjoy, others may be exasper-
ated by, "the symbols, the coincidences,
the repetitions, the interweaving."
— Rebecca Kaplan Boroson,
The Jewish Standard
Nonfictio
SHIKSA GODDESS: OR How
I SPENT MY FORTIES
By Wendy Wasserstein.
(Alfred A. Knopf; 235 pp.; $23.)
he Pulitzer Prize-winning
playwright Wendy
Wasserstein was born in
Brooklyn and grew up in
Manhattan in a traditional Jewish
family. Traditional in this case means
the emphasis was on achievement and
the Bible. Not the entire Bible, neces-
sarily, but that part that spoke about
being fruitful and multiplying after
marrying a doctor.
Consider that when she graduated
from college, her parents began to call her
every morning to sing "Sunrise, Sunset."
Years later, at a party for her long-run-
ning hit The Sisters Rosenzweig, an execu-
tive with Lincoln Center approached
Wasserstein's mom, Lola, and said, "You
must be proud of your daughter."
.As the author recalls, Lola replied
that, yes, she was, "but wouldn't it be
nicer if this were a wedding?"
Welcome to the wonderful. world of
Wasserstein.
Wasserstein has been mining this
mother lode of angst for over three
decades. In addition to The Sisters
Rosenzweig, she is the playwright of
The Heidi Chronicles (which won both
a Tony and Pulitzer Prize) and An
American Daughter.
Increasingly she is becoming known
for her essays and articles. Shiksa Goddess,
a collection of three dozen of these
pieces, has just been published. The book
is roughly a decade's worth of mostly
light-hearted prose — articles, satire, per-
sonality profiles — written for magazines
like New Woman and the New Yorker.
In the title piece, Wasserstein comes
out of the closet. After noting that
Madeline Albright and Hillary
Clinton, among others, have recently
embraced their Jewish roots,
Wasserstein fesses up about a recent
T
discovery: her great-uncle twice
removed may once have been married
to a WASP. She revels in her newly
found background by making chicken
sandwiches on white bread with a
healthy dose of mayonnaise.
But it is the last two serious pieces,
about her new daughter, that are the
book's heart and soul. They are gut
wrenching, life affirming autobio-
graphical essays that show how power-
ful good writing can be.
In "1-kow I Spent My Forties,"
Wasserstein describes her struggle to get
pregnant. Her efforts as an older single
woman determined to give birth are
juxtaposed against a beloved older sis-
ter's unsuccessful battle against cancer.
In "Days of Awe: The Birth of Lucy
Jane," Wasserstein writes about the birth
of her daughter, who was delivered sev-
eral months early by Caesarian section
because Wasserstein herself was ill.
It was touch and go after the birth,
with Lucy Jane spending a month in
neonatal intensive care. This is powerful
stuff from a writer who knows drama.
Lucy Jane, now 18 months old, is
doing fine. Her arrival has imposed a
sense of order in Wasserstein's work
life, which used to be more catch-as-
catch-can. The baby has inspired her
mom in other ways, too, including
providing the subject of her new play.
"I look at Lucy and wonder what she
thinks about me. She makes me want
to write about my mother. She makes
me want to understand my mother."
Despite any thorns in their relation-
ship, Wasserstein feels that she and her
mother are very close and adds, "I find
her one of the most interesting people
I've ever known."
Although things are going well for
her at the moment, it doesn't mean
that the angst meter registers any
lower. On the contrary Wasserstein
says, "Now I'm anxious for two." ❑
— Curt Schleier
THROUGH THE UNKNOWN,
REMEMBERED GATE: A
SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
A.,
By Emily Benedek
(Schocken; 272 pp; $24)
fter losing her sight, journal-
ist and author Emily
Benedek finds an inner
ight, a light that was always
there. It was as though she just had to
figure out how to flip the switch.
Her severely blurred vision was, for-
tunately, a temporary state, which she
later attributes to a "deep psychic con-
fusion," as she writes in a compelling
memoir in which she recounts her