Book Review : Mixed Bag of Stories From Kotzwinkle

Jewel of the Moon by William Kotzwinkle (Putnam’s: $14.95)

Suppose you’re a 19-year-old girl, and smart as well as beautiful. You can have any basketball player you want, but a sky-high intellectual with John Lennon glasses gives you a book for Christmas--”Le Desire Attrappe par le Coeur,” Pablo Picasso’s only play--and now smartypants (your classmate) has a birthday coming up. What do you do about it, since you know he’s already read everything, in that insistent undergraduate way of his? Scoot on out to your nearest independent bookstore and buy him a copy of William Kotzwinkle’s “Jewel of the Moon.”

No one’s read it yet, it looks spooky and delicious and the author’s picture on the back looks like a combination of Merlin and Lennon himself. Direct the intellectual’s attention particularly to “Sun, Moon and Storm,” which chronicles the life of the artist Antonio Correggio as he painted his masterwork on a cathedral dome for venal theologians who care nothing for genius. . . .

Or, suppose you’re 19 and beautiful as well as smart. The basketball center on the college team has been hanging around, giving you woof-eyes and you think he’s pretty cute, so--in Math, probably--you hand him “Jewel of the Moon,” wrapped carelessly in newspaper. “No big deal,” you tell him. “No biggee. Just read ‘Victory at North Antor.’ When I read it, I don’t know why, I thought of you.”

Jumble of Stories

What we are addressing here, then, is a book of short stories, wildly different, thematically chaotic, attractively written. The stories are a jumble. No one (outside of the author) seems to have given them much thought or attention: A lax publicity release announces that only two of these stories have been published before: “All the others are being published for the first time,” but the author’s agent has countered that nine of these have already seen print.

And no one seems to know what to make of them. Again, the publicity release quotes Kurt Vonnegut: “William Kotzwinkle’s materials seem to come from way down deep.” Well, OK, but don’t most writers of fiction scramble around, dredging up their materials from “way down deep”?

The truth may be that these stories are so varied in tone that if you like some, you probably won’t be able to stomach the others: the volume is a mixed review. For instance, the title story is an erotic myth of creation, a god and goddess on a steamy honeymoon of sorts, creating the universe.

Again, in “Fana,” a tale of a Middle-Eastern dancing girl who is the very embodiment of the winking universe, the same themes are suggested: “There waited a white camel bearing a noble sheik. In the hoof-beats of the camel Al-nujum heard the drumming of time, and in the eyes of the sheik he saw the race of man. The sheik’s own heart was a flame which no man could extinguish, and here Al-nujum was inclined to rest--but Fana undulated once more.”

Clearly, here is a man who holds the sexual act in high regard, and who could argue against that? But readers who dote on this silken-pillow literature can’t be expected to like “Victory at North Antor,” which depicts life in a working-class high school, in a fiendish small town, in the middle of Northeast nowhere--a town where the adults live in mill shacks and have, as vocational opportunities, “the button mill, the pillow factory, or the sewer works.” Is it possible for there to be heroism in such grim and forgotten worlds? Certainly, for some--and that heroism heartens even the inarticulate gnomes still locked inside these hells of the imagination.

Great Fun to Read

“Victory at North Antor,” with its rich cast of characters--Shrimp Sondoni, Tootzi Zonka, Tony One-Punch and Franky Plunger--is great fun to read, as is “Star Cruisers, Welcome,” in which an invincible space ship full of invincible aliens (who literally eat Earth for lunch) makes the mistake of landing in the South Bronx, where the ship is taken apart, with terrific casualness, by a gang called the Walton Avenue Baldies, who sell their space parts to the local fence and break out the space booze.

A wonderful story, but where does that leave the lavender intricacies of Fana and Zahir and Al-nujum? It seems that this slim volume literally isn’t big enough for Fana and Tootsie Zonka.

More than 100 years ago, as they never tire of telling us in literature classes, Wordsworth and Coleridge got together and decided that for a project they’d work--separately--on making “strange things familiar and familiar things strange.” Thus, that host of golden daffodils from Wordsworth, and that Ancient Mariner from Coleridge. But, for the sake of their own fevered minds, they didn’t try doing both at once, as does Kotzwinkle. Never mind. Give this book to nice male undergraduates of every stripe. They’ll appreciate the culture and like the sex; they may grow their hair long, and buy a monocle like that pixie author on the back.