Book Review : Bagels and Leis: An Ethnic Potpourri of Odd Couples

Total Immersion by Allegra Goodman (Harper & Row: $16.95; 272 pages)

You know you’re in the presence of an altogether original talent when there’s a glossary of Hebrew, Yiddish and Hawaiian words at the back of the book. Though the 21-year-old author of these wise and witty stories has inevitably been compared to Philip Roth, the differences are more significant than the similarities. Weequahic High School was monolithic; Oahu Prep is as ethnically mixed as the islands themselves, and if there are any physical resemblances between Honolulu and South Orange, N.J., you’d have to dig down to the Pleistocene era to uncover them.

Fresh and funny as “Goodby, Columbus” was when it appeared in 1959, Roth was a mature 26, a bit past the cut-off point for prodigies and far from the first person to deal with the delight and despair of growing up in an insular American Jewish enclave. Newark may not have been Brooklyn, the Bronx or Chicago, but it wasn’t exactly terra incognita either.

Goodman’s Hawaiian settings would be enough in themselves to distinguish her work from anything else in the genre, but even when her characters are temporarily pursuing their academic interests in Oxford, compiling oral history in Venice, Calif., or dealing with family emergencies in New York, they’re not likely to remind you of anyone else you might have known in similar situations.

A Unique Experience

While unique is not a critically sound word, it’s almost impossible to think of another to describe a story in which a family of Yemenite caterers cooks a strictly kosher dinner in honor of Elizabeth McCrae, who has flown to Honolulu to meet Charles Yim, the man with whom her daughter, Margaret, has been living for two years.

“Mother, this wasn’t advertised as a betrothal banquet,” Margaret says, as the bizarre evening is winding down. “No,” Elizabeth allows. “Nor did you say that Charles is a married man and has no intention of marrying you.” One way and another, this particular fiesta departs radically from all previous attempts to satirize family reunions, with or without nuptials. On the strength of “Further Ceremony” alone, one could say that Allegra Goodman defies comparison.

Consider Clare, in the story of the same name. Though she manages to get herself employed as a translator, she believes she’s being pursued by German police and Spanish nuns, who “would lock her in her room like a prisoner in a tower, spinning their straw into English.” To elude them, Clare works only in the Oxford parks, weather permitting or not.

Though you’re bound to agree with her brother-in-law, Cecil, that Clare is quite mad, you should reserve judgment until you’ve read her poetry, or at least met the Israeli novelist suing her for fraud, her publisher who doubles as a Laura Ashley franchisee, or the taxi driver from Bangladesh, where “they have computers with metal fingers that trace the palest ballpoint ink and turn the letters into print.”

Gift for Funeral Orations

In “The Succession,” you’ll be introduced to the rabbi emeritus of Martin Buber Temple in Honolulu, who had a special gift for funeral orations. “His secret is that he does not try to comfort or give hope. . . . He understands that this is what the mourners want: the reassurance that they are inconsolable.” Imagine a man of such stature replaced by an upstart who invests in dubious condominium schemes and whose wife complains that “there aren’t any fun people here,” and you understand how a mundane incident can be transformed into fiction. Though the environment helps, the hilarious result depends upon the writer’s precise blend of irreverence and affection.

Though the 11 stories in “Total Immersion” often begin with a traditional situation--homecomings, marital discord, family conflict, the effects of geographical displacement--Goodman refreshes and virtually reinvents every theme she explores. Occasionally a few people from one story will reappear in another, but essentially the material is connected only by the author’s intense concern with cultural and generational differences; the cast of leading characters as pluralistic as the islands themselves.

Looking west from the Pacific Rim; east from Harvard and Oxford, the most familiar material becomes genuinely exotic. As the first published work of a young woman still an undergraduate, this collection is an astonishing display of virtuosity.