DISCOVERIES

The Good Cripple

A Novel

Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Translated from the Spanish

by Esther Allen

New Directions: 116 pp.,

$13.95 paper

Bunny, a good man with a wife and children, gets a call at his home in Guatemala City. It is from Juan Luis Luna, who, many years ago -- in another lifetime, really -- was kidnapped by three childhood friends, including Bunny, and two other thugs. The son of a wealthy man, Juan was lowered into a hole. First his toe was cut off and sent to his father, who did not respond to the kidnappers’ demands. Then his foot. His father paid. Juan lives, marries his girlfriend and becomes a writer. But his life is punctuated by visions of his kidnappers. He wants revenge, but when it hovers within reach, he cannot bring himself to strike. All the decisions, big and small, that are taken in this brief novel (big toe, little toe; whether to pay off the kidnappers; whether to live in Tangiers or Guatemala; whether to finish off Juan; whether to kill Bunny years later) are made in a world without morals, in a vacuum filled only with possible behaviors. Characters do only what they can in the moment. They are all equally weak. But the novel will not be put down.

*

Nights in the

Gardens of

Brooklyn

The Collected Stories

of Harvey Swados

Harvey Swados

New York Review Books:

406 pp., $14.95 paper

Harvey SWADOS was one of the best of a generation of post-World War II writers torn between socialism and literature. European authors of the era got around the problem with a high artifice that bordered on surrealism. They barely wrote for an audience. In New York it was publish or perish; choose your class and write about it. Barth, Roth and later Carver made stages from suburbia or academia. Writers like Swados and Grace Paley had regular jobs that could be lost in an instant over politics. While the Roths and Updikes floated above the working class, Swados, who died in 1972 at 52, wallowed in it. The stories in the newly reissued “Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn,” written in the ‘50s and ‘60s, still contain an element of disbelief. Their characters, many just back from the war, are beginning their adult lives: new apartments, new jobs, new girlfriends, new wives. They hardly know what to believe in, but believe they do -- in the American Left, in the Partisan Review, in their paychecks, in Brooklyn. One by one, they stick their pins in the American dream: the academic who has no idea how to live; the social worker who gets more out of his clients than he gives; the young mother whose career is abandoned. None are ready for the choices life forces on them. They thought they could have it all. “Burton Rettler had no intention of falling in love when he entered Vic’s Pharmacy” begins the story “A Year of Grace.” No intention at all.

*

The Paris Review

Book for Planes,

Trains, Elevators,

and Waiting Rooms

Paris Review

Picador: 386 pp., $15 paper

Something’s not right about this collection for readers in transit. Perhaps it’s the notion of stopping time while moving, fast. Reading, writes Richard Powers in the introduction to “The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms,” is the “last refuge from the real-time epidemic.” Stories to be read on planes are full of fast, jerky, unnatural movements. A jug is thrown, a face is slapped, all against a backdrop of looming institutions and sleeping towns. The section for trains, with stories by Raymond Carver, T.C. Boyle and Lydia Davis, are full of mean, small-minded characters living in Sinclair Lewis towns. You pass through, glimpsing cramped lives. The elevator section (my favorite, since it’s an alternative to those wretched silences) is full of marvelous short poems. But the section for waiting rooms, with only three long, lugubrious stories, is the strangest of all. These leave the reader feeling trapped in a story in a book in a room.