Newsday (Nassau Edition) from Hempstead, New York • 76

8 Life on the Altar of Art fL turned a corner see it in the distance glittering in the smokeless air You could never lose it It was always near Exactly like you my love Exactly like Out in the in every way fulfills the promise of lovely first novel (1991) You could say that these books are meditations on people seeking harmony between what they do and who they are What makes novels seem like gifts is that grounded in the recognizable banal world of coffee shops and bus stops and hospitals and offices and are alive to the possibilities that world offers for beauty and human connection At first they seem to be all grace notes until you hit a passage where the emotion is well-deep and you realize everything else has been preparing you for that moment There may be young novelists who are more daring or work on a larger scale I think of one who combines brains with tenderness the way Brian Morton does STMT1NB OUT IN THE EVENING by Brian Morton Crown 325 pp 25 By Charles Taylor WOULD BE EASY to nay that Brian wonderful new novel Out in the is the kind of book that gets you reading novels in the first place What seems more important is that filially the kind of book that keeps you reading novels Out in the begins by offering you the basics a good story and characters you come to care about But nothing basic about the shrewd compassion of an innately humane writer and the ambition of one who believes a duty to lay out a vision of life that is simultaneously a vision of art fitting that a novel so aware of the exaggerated claims made for writers accomplishes that without ever violating its unassuming air Out in the pretend to be more than a portrait of several people in a couple of small corners of the New York literaiy world And since Morton a transgressive or experimental writer the book may strike some readers as old-fashioned But Out in the is as aware of its moment as it is able to beyond it And when I finished it I help feeling that what with the sturdy delicacy of writing his unembarrassed conviction that a novel should have large concerns and the unsentimental warmth accorded every character this is what a novel is supposed to be starts out in a Manhattan coffee shop where Heather Wolfe a graduate student in her 20s is meeting Leonard Schiller a novelist in his mid-708 Schiller has produced four novels all of them out of print and has been laboring for almost a dozen years on what he believes will be his last Heather stumbled upon first two novels in her teens and felt they were speaking directly to her Now she wants cooperation as she prepares her thesis on his work She believes tire thesis will be the springboard for a book and a brilliant literary career Schiller knows his chance at such a career is past Still he harbors hopes that Heather may be able to bring him some recognition and warily even a trifle vainly he agrees to help her Heather is impatiently ambitious and the one thing she forgive in Schiller is that despite his lifelong commitment to writing he has accepted compromise and loss as part of life and admitted that acceptance into his later writing Schiller help but be attracted in all sorts of ways to energy At the same time slightly appalled by her need to make it The particulars here belong to the world of New York novelists and journalists and the sketches of its people institutions and rituals are deft and sharp But Morton being gossipy or indulging in name-dropping using the relationship between Heather and Schiller as the basis for exploring some pretty big themes not just the in- -tersection between young and old but between life and art between acceptance and dissatisfaction Morton is asking how much of life a writer has to sacrifice for art and how good any writer can be without a lived life to draw on And he's included a third major character 39-year-old daughter Uriel caught between the poles represented by Schiller and Heather young enough to hope for change old enough to see the likely pattern of her life One of the loveliest things about writing is the way he uses contemporary references to provide a texture without becoming trendy or shallow In one passage Heather compares her relationship witn Schiller to the one between Mrs Peel and Steed on loved the way Mr Steed would look at Mrs Peel: a gaze that was appreciative but not acquisitive a gaze filled with desire but without vulgarity though they were mad about each other they never touched they made love only with their And metaphors coalesce so lightly so gracefully that they often catch you on the rebound In an exquisite chapter Schiller travels to Paris to keep a date he made 40 years before with his now-dead wife to meet at the Eiffel Tower seemed right that they had arranged to meet at this spot near this monument this huge and beautiful cliche when you were in this city you could never lose it You could be wandering around through narrow winding streets in some unfamiliar district utterly disoriented and suddenly when you Photo tgr8igrid Eatmk Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Salon an on-line culture magazine Men and Other Mammals ANIMAL HUSBANDRY by Laura Zigman Dial 301 pp S2295 York in search of glamorous jobs live like rats work like dogs mate like chinchillas and have bovine relationships That is the Bocial context of this novel Too much publicity not enough content For starters Jane and Ray work in the same office the executive producer of a TV talk show and she books talent Her best friend Joan is an editor at Times magazine Her other best friend David is a gay photographer We are meant to understand that Jane is smart and capable and independent (which makes it unbelievably excruciating when she believes everything Crew says for example that the 24-year-old blond office assistant he goes everywhere with is his Almost all of 30-year-old wisdom lies in her fantastic sense of life-saving humor After Ray she thinks learned many lessons that there is a high-interest layaway payment plan for passion: one year of pain for every month of pleasure spent That most of the things men say turn out to be lies even if they mean them to be and even if they never ad- Bp Susan Salter Reynolds ROM THE GIRLIE Bide the war between the sexes no longer has the sisterhood-is-powerful class-action feel told it had for that brief period in history when feminist was a positive hopeful thing to be Its new incarnation resembles ordinary warfare evolved from hand-to-hand combat requiring teamwork and loyalty to strategic surgical strikes aimed at an increasingly faceless enemy Because we can now legally own property and can sort-of-kind-of ask nicely for competitive salaries there is also more to lose many of its predecessors in books and movies in in Hariy Met is a novel about men and women that is not ing data from both the human and animal kingdoms and trying to create theories that will explain Why Men Behave Like Such Total Reptiles Sure he was the first to say love Sure he chased her up and down the block before winning her heart Sure he said he wanted to live with her Sure he said he would leave the woman he was engaged to marry all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power In the actual act of deception they are overcome by belief in themselves The only thing he do was join Promise Keepers But every reader worth her weight in Jack Daniels and self-help books knows that Ray is The Compleat Loser Nor is Jane above reproach First she refers one too many times to his Crew good looks Yuck And his certainly compels her more than any of his internal organs Soulmates? Since when was muscle definition a basis for trust? Part of this fiasco can be blamed on social context (By the way it should be clear by now that this is an engaging book) Young people who move to New Photo tqr Lynn Ooldunlth Laura Zigman a study of obsession or an attempt to answer the question: Can Men and Women Be Friends? The question here is quite simply What the Hell Is Wrong With Men? Our narrator is a mad scientist named Jane Goodall (yes) a good modern girl who spends about 20 seconds (geologic time I'm sure she feels an eternity) in terrible pain when the man of her dreams loses interest after a whopping three-month relationship (real time) When she comes up for air she begins a course of research collect NEWSOAY SUNDAY JANUARY 4 1998 Susan Salter Reynolds is an assistant editor and book critic at the Los Angeles Times Please see ZIGMAN on Page B14.