cover image Cry of the Leopard

Cry of the Leopard

Alan Steinberg. Wyatt Book, $21.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-312-15507-0

The influence of the great modern German fantasists (Kafka, Mann, Hesse) pervades the circus scenes, freak shows and shadows of this cerebral first novel from poet and playwright Steinberg (The Road to Corinth; Ebstein on Reflection). But whereas those writers managed to mate the symbolic and the psychological, this effort at fantasy remains disappointingly stiff and distant. Abandoned by his mother because of his leopard-like pelt, outsized teeth and aggressive feline instincts, the Leopard Man, as he is known, is an outcast at a Catholic orphanage, where the Reverend Mother finally decides he will be a Jew. He finds a home in the back of a hardware store owned by another outcast, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who changed his name to Smyth, and his son Simon. The Leopard Man haunts zoos, communing with the caged animals, until he meets Obaman, who leads a nocturnal existence as an undercover witch doctor. Obaman lures him into participating in a ritualistic sacrifice in which he reveals his true nature and kills a man. Fleeing to the woods, Leopard Man finally finds companionship as one of the freaks in a traveling circus. Although Steinberg succeeds in evoking the Leopard Man's estrangement from a world not prepared to accept him, the secondary characters are wooden and stereotyped (a love scene between the Leopard Man and a fellow circus member is especially maudlin). This is a book with high intellectual ambitions but lacking the small human moments that would bring its ideas to life. First serial to Carolina Quarterly. (Aug.)