Word: first-person
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MEMORABLE CHARACTERS here--like most of Bashevis Singer's more important character sketches elsewhere--derive the most rudimentary aspects of their personalities from being Jewish. "Hanka" is the story of a mysterious woman by the same name whom the first-person narrator meets in Argentina. She lived in the ghettoes of Warsaw during the Nazi occupation--saved only by her Gentile lover on the "Aryan side" of the city. Despite surviving the Holocaust, her experience living in a hidden closet, every minute fearing capture and torture, has convinced Hanka that she is dead: "Those who stood at the threshhold...
Throughout these stories the Holocaust has left an indelible impression on the lives of its survivors, even those who escaped its wrath beforehand. So just as the first-person narrator describes a woman's eye in "Sabbath in Portugal" as having "an embarrassment and a modesty which I did not know still existed," and then recalls his first love "whom I had never dared kiss, and who had been shot by the Nazis in 1943," so too, aging Harry Bendiner in "Old Love," thinks himself a fool to believe in God "After what happened to the Jews in Europe...
Tucked in among the stories about the Church are several secular ones, which underline the confusion in the modern world. A three-page story that most clearly reveals Powers's disenchantment with modern society opens with a short clipping from a magazine, part of a first-person account of wifeswapping. A Christmas letter from one of the couples to the other follows, but where you expect at least some mention of the intimate experience that the four shared, you find only the details of the lawnmower they owned in common before one couple moved away (each couple owned $44 worth...
UPDIKE APPARENTLY feels obligated to justify a first-person narration with some explanation of how the words got onto the paper. This kind of feeling has afflicted other 20th century writers, and sometimes it leads to contrived situations. Take this one, for example: The Reverend Marshfield suffers from "distraction." As a cure, his bishop orders him to spend a month in the desert, atoning. But this being truly the latter age, ascetism is not what it once was, and Marshfield gets to expiate his sins in fairly comfortable surroundings--a motel, actually. He is forbidden serious "intrapersonal or doctrinal" conversation...
Beatty, who was in Cambridge to accept the Hasty Pudding Club's Man-of-the-Year award, said he will star in a movie about John Reed '10, author of the first-person account of the Bolshevik revolution, "Ten Days That Shook the World...