A veteran avant-garde novelist, playwright and translator of Beckett's Eleutheria
, Brodsky (Detour
) resurfaces with this beguiling collection of two novellas, one short story and three short-shorts. The title novella, which opens the collection, is written in that trickiest of forms, the second person (“you feel excluded, snubbed, far more than you've ever been, ever allowed yourself to be”), and follows the Beckettian peregrinations of Goodis (“you, Goodis!”) as he steals an overcoat, sits in a noirish diner and falls in with a low-end criminal gang, all the while commenting feverishly on what he sees: “Among the trashcans that divvy up the eft-head glimmer of an expiring streetlamp, you choose the biggest one to hide behind.” The second novella, “Midtown Pythagoras,” closes the book and is a similarly noirish, and very funny, play on detective fiction; a writer hires a private dick to strong-arm a reviewer into changing her views of the writer's work: “if I could make her vision of him coincide with his own then at last all would be well with his posterities.” All the work here is drenched in a weary angst, but Brodsky's joyful relief in writing—despite uncertain posterities—comes through on every page. (Nov.)
