My America!

Plot

Chicago Tribune Bookworld, Sept. 28, 1980 An Ethnic Novel filled with wonder and cheer My America! By Eliot Wagner Reviewed by Teresa Godwin Phelps Some books make you want to cheer, and Eliot Wagner's latest novel, "My America!" is one of them. Another book about Jewish immigrants and their descendants in New York City sounds about as undistinguished and ordinary as yesterday's chicken soup. Nonetheless, Eliot Wagner achiever in "My America?" a freshness and vitality that only a writer of uncommon talent can. Not only does he create characters that live long after you have finished the book, he risks pushing the possibilities of language and narrative style by telling the story itself with the speech patterns of the people he describes, the very intonation, rhythms, and dialects of his characters. Wagner writes with a poet's attention to the sounds, connotations, and patterns of words and dialog, and is no doing effectively draws the reader into the story and into the minds of the Shares and their assorted relatives. In "My America!" Wagner chronicles the lives of the philandering Hymie Share (a kind of Jewish-American Leopold Bloom), his long-suffering wife Golda, and their three children, Danny, Naomi, and Leah. Mixed into the Shares' lives are their saintly cousin Reisel and her paranoid mother Gittel, who have come to New York fleeing the revolutionaries in Russia: "Reds or Whites - who know which, and what was the difference?" The Shares and their relatives struggle to survive in Manhattan's Lower East Side during the early 1900's, and Wagner presents their unique griefs and joys with a commingling of poignancy and humor. The story focuses finally on Danny Share and his entrepreneurial wife Carrie. Tough Carrie, who grew up on a chicken farm in Orange, N.J., single-handedly parlays the Share family business, Quality Lamps, into a financial empire capable of buying up choice Manhattan property. The tension between the expedient and unscrupulous Carrie and her principled and idealistic husband provides much of the novel's energy. With Danny and Carrie, we fall in love and out again, we gain and lose money in the stock market during the heady and careening `20's, we survive the Crash, we watch with fear as Hitler - " That madman? He'll never last!" - gobbles up Europe, and we send sons off to war. With them we relive the history of the first half of this century, the events that inexorably determined today's attitude. Wagner never resorts to stock characters, banal dialog, of shopworn occurrences, and if we respond to this book and these characters as familiar, it is because the author captures some of the vital truth of life and experience. When this happens, reading becomes more than a passive act. Reading incorporates hearing, seeing, smelling, and feeling, and fiction achiever a rare veracity a palpability. These are the possibilities inherent in literature that George Steiner recognizes in "Language and Silence," when a book is written so that we as readers are compelled to "Engage the presence, the voice of the book" and "allow it entry, though not unguarded, into our inmost." This is high praise for any fiction writer, yet by mixing an unflinching perception of human psychology with a lyrical sense of dialog, Wagner frequently succeeds in "My America!" Moreover, "My America!" is a wonderful, exuberant book that crackles with humor and goodwill toward life. "My America!", Wagner's third novel (the other two: "Grand Concourse" and "Better Occasions") inaugurates the publishing list of Kenan Press, a new division of Simon & Schuster. After the cynical `70's, we can celebrate that the `80's commences with a novel full of energy, optimism, and hope. At the end of "My America!" Danny Share sits listening to a Mozart concert, and he thinks: "Now old Mozart twisted you around, turned you inside out, all but extinguished you.... and then left you smiling when he said goodbye. That was supposed to be a flaw.... Flaw my ass - that signoff said, "Mozart's the name!" Following his master Mozart, Wagner leads the reader through the kaleidoscopic changer in the Shares' lives, and concludes his story on a cheerful, upbeat note. Given the melancholy and pessimistic tone of so much contemporary fiction, we must ask: Flaw? No, just remember - Wagner's the name!