First Fiction

IF I TOLD YOU ONCE

By Judy Budnitz

Picador USA: 296 pp., $24

In her bold first novel, Judy Budnitz traces four generations of women from a turn-of-the-century middle European village to present-day tongue-pierced America. But this is no sweeping, triumphant saga set against a scrolling backdrop of pogroms, depressions and world wars. Instead, Budnitz’s story unfolds with--and never forsakes--the edifying, cocoon-like mystery of a tale from the Brothers Grimm. Just as the Grimms set their work in forested demesnes far from any identifiable era, Budnitz obscures place and history, even as they invade the lives of these women with horrible consequences. Of the four, the true heroine is Ilana, who grows up in a tiny house in the woods in an unnamed land near an unnamed village. Her mother practices herbology, and her brother is a soft-hearted hirsute giant who inadvertently tears sheep limb from limb. One day, Ilana runs away, seeking the magical city depicted on a bejeweled egg given to her by a handsome bandit. Her journey eventually leads her to a husband named Shmuel, an actor in a raffish traveling company, and takes them both across the wide sea to a place where people live cheek-by-jowl in squalid tenements. In this towering New World environment, Ilana grows old and wise, clinging to the unlikely stories of her youth, which are spurned as lies and fables by her assimilation-obsessed daughter Sashie (who convinces herself of a regal lineage), and her shiftless granddaughter Mara but which are finally welcomed by Nomie, her great-granddaughter. Without even mentioning Ellis Island, Budnitz creates a powerful telling of the immigrant experience in the person a woman who journeys out of a medieval world into the roar of modernity and who stubbornly insists that even the most oft-told “stories are what keep us alive.”

*

A WINDOW FACING WEST

A Novel

By John S. Tarlton

Bridge Works: 176 pp., $22.95

Gatlin, a Baton Rouge businessman turning the perilous age of 47, may be cowed by middle age, but he still has a flair for making point-blank assessments of himself: “My heart is a fetid backwater of unrequited lust,” he admits without pride or embarrassment. Gatlin is the narrator and hero of John S. Tarlton’s loping plain-spoken novella; deprived of sex by Sarah, his “wife, lover and verbal combatant these past twenty-four years,” pondering his late father’s obsession with nuclear annihilation and spending his days admiring the panoramic view west from his office window, Gatlin is the kind of guy who has just enough resignation to be able to tell the unvarnished truth about himself but not so much that he can’t do anything about it. When it turns out that two of his buddies are carrying on dual affairs with an insatiable suburban “Madame X,” Gatlin begins to ponder an invigorating fling, even as his straight-laced friend Rick tries to show him the value of such feel-good pursuits as visiting premature babies in the hospital and wearing a fake beard in order to play God in a skit for the inmates of Angola Prison. But Gatlin isn’t distracted; he guesses the identity of the mysterious seductress and sets up an appointment to go over her portfolio with her, seemingly placing himself on a collision course with both sexual fulfillment and personal disaster. With gentle wit and unflagging sympathy, Tarlton shows that inertia can do some very weird things to a person and that great seductions usually play out better in the imagination than they do on back porches.

*

PAPA’S CORD

A Novel

By Mary Pleshette Willis

Alfred A. Knopf: 212 pp., $22

The title of this novel does not refer to an antique car, nor to anything spinal--although spinal injury does play a big role here--but to the unwavering and sometimes unwanted connection between a woman growing up in the ‘60s on the Upper East Side and her larger-than-life gynecologist dad. For Josie, it seems that every woman is in love with, or has had babies delivered by, her father, Dr. Albert Davidovitch. In fact, her mother was once Dr. D’s patient, and the family business is such a big deal that her first Pap smear (performed, to Josie’s dismay, by another doctor) has all the ritual significance of a bas mitzvah. But there’s a darker side to this fertility god patriarch who, at home, is prone to a kind of explosive bullying (don’t spill your milk) that inspires unconditional, submissive love in Josie, her mom and her brother David. When Josie graduates from N.Y.U. and becomes engaged to a handsome documentary filmmaker named Gus, independence is in the air. But Gus becomes paralyzed after a swimming accident, and their decision to go through with the marriage infuriates the doctor. Even when Gus regains enough movement to walk on two canes, the couple is unable to conceive a child, leaving Josie in a state of constant anxiety and horniness. (She’s hilariously aware of men’s body parts.) After Josie and Gus sell their tragedy to publishers and TV, they begin to drift apart, while back home, Josie’s father, now retired, is besieged by a black depression. All the while, Josie is consumed by visions of infidelity and of a baby, “a phantom confection of spun sugar and clouds.” Thanks to Mary Pleshette Willis’ light touch, this story of bodily harm, infertility, adultery, selling out to Hollywood and suicide manages to be as brisk and restorative as a springtime walk through Central Park.